This op-ed was rejected by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
(Sometime in the future.)
Tell me about life before the coronavirus, Grandfather.
It was another life. Things were more sociable then, especially in the great cities. There was at least one café on every block and people thought nothing of approaching total strangers. It was safe to be friendlier then.
We all seemed to have plenty of money. There was more work. There was a job for everybody who wanted one. People worked in offices together, side by side. You didn’t just talk facing a screen. Your life wasn’t lived on a little screen. You knew how your coworkers smelled.
Part of this, I suppose, was that you thought you knew what people were thinking. Everybody didn’t always have to wear a mask, for starters, so their faces weren’t hidden. Masks turn us all into spies. Guarding our important secrets.
Back then, an extremely corrupt politician named Trump was in charge. It was easy to blame Trump for everything. But Trump wasn’t really in charge of anything.
Still, there seemed plenty to talk about. The latest books, for example. I can’t prove it, but I think people read more. They borrowed books from the libraries, which were full of people. Just as the streets were full of people.
Were any wearing masks, Grandfather? Did you trust them?
Nobody wore a mask before the pandemic. It would’ve seemed strange.
Unless you were in China or India, because of the smog.
But you didn’t necessarily trust your neighbors. You couldn’t. Just as in no time, you didn’t know which neighbors were out to kill you simply by breathing on you, you also couldn’t predict which neighbors might turn out to be maniacs with a babysitter caged in the basement.
You did trust your neighbor at the theater or the movie theater. It seemed there was always something to go to, it gave everybody something to talk about, and you had a convenient excuse for a date. You didn’t have to think up something.
There were plenty of restaurants, of course, full of people. This was true across the country. You didn’t have to sit six feet apart to survive. And there were bars, too, where people went to drink and talk with each other. The bars made a lot of money, like the musicians who played in them. People will pay for live music.
Were things better then between the races, Grandfather?
Things were awful. Things were always awful between the white people in charge and everybody else.
Part of the problem is our guilt. We’re proud of our guilt, beginning with all we did to the Native Americans. We certainly don’t want to give up our guilt, no matter what it costs.
You have to understand. Look, this country is like a big ship in the middle of the ocean. It takes an awfully long time to turn it around.
In those days there were statues everywhere, put up by the people in charge. Like most statues, they were designed to help people forget, not to make them remember. So the statues got taken down. It wasn’t enough, it was only a start. If you ask me, personally I think it can only ever be a start.
You told me once that you traveled all the time. Was that true?
We traveled everywhere. We took it for granted. The entire planet felt safe, and available. The rich thought nothing of flying to Paris or across the country for dinner and a romantic weekend. The rest of us took a train. It didn’t matter how crowded we were. That was part of the fun.
Did everybody think that the virus would end one day soon?
We hoped so. Nobody with any brains thought so. I knew it would always be with us. The scientists said that it would. So humanity had better be prepared. We had to make our changes permanent changes. We had to alter everything we did. And we were thinking we only had to worry about climate change! Now this. It made falling in love very different, I promise you.
Few people want to die, and like being reminded that they don’t matter much. During the third wave and fourth wave and fifth wave of the virus we thought back with great nostalgia on a time when we didn’t know what those terms meant. Then we lost count. I couldn’t possibly tell you which wave we’re on now.
How was falling in love different then, Grandfather?
You saw what you were getting, for starters. You didn’t just go by the eyes, like Muslims. And your voice wasn’t muffled. You could hear each other clearly.
You weren’t compelled to assume the other person was diseased. That helps.
It was easier to meet strangers, of course.
You make the past sound too good to be true, Grandfather.
I suppose it was. We didn’t realize how happy we were. It was another world.
Showing posts with label The Americas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Americas. Show all posts
Saturday, June 20, 2020
Sunday, February 3, 2019
The Actual Don Shirley (1927 - 2013)
Much abbreviated, the following brief memoir ran as an op-ed in the L.A. Times on February 3, 2019. I was remarkably prescient. Soon after, the actor who played "Don Shirley" in "Green Book" won Best Supporting Actor, and the film somehow won Best Picture of the Year. Briefly, Donald's music was again seemingly everywhere.
The African-American pianist Don Shirley wouldn’t be surprised that the country he loved was prepared to embrace a screen version of his prickly persona rather than grapple with the societal questions raised by his music.
Decades ago, before I moved overseas, for several years we were very good friends. I met Donald (“I’m not a Don. That’s a stage name.”) in 1980. I’d just graduated from Yale, and made my way to Manhattan to seek my fortune as an artist. I was a classical as well as a jazz guitarist; the combination was much rarer then. I’d been a music major at Yale and was still studying composition. In those days, the famous were more accessible than now. I looked up Shirley in the phone book—he was unlisted—then called the Musicians’ Union.
I’d discovered his music by accident, haunting a used-record shop near my college apartment. That solo 1955 LP was one of his best: his improvised sonata on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld. I was attracted to the formality of his approach as well as the kudos of the notoriously hard-to-please Igor Stravinsky (“His virtuosity is worthy of gods.”). The music, by turns dreamily lavish or austerely rational, thrilled me.
I was particularly taken by how this fellow Shirley suggested the Underworld from the very get-go, restating his opening theme in the parallel minor tonality, then using that idea throughout the sonata. This organic architecture appealed enormously.
Donald asked me to drop by for a chat. He lived in a “studio” above Carnegie Hall. (After nearly fifty years, he moved out just before his death.) The high-ceilinged place was vast, ornate, a silk-and-antique extravaganza, hung with billowy drapes and festooned with candles and bric-a-brac. It seemed a temple consecrated to the Steinway grand. Donald was big, shaven-headed, with a misleadingly sinister mustache. He spoke regally and softly, an erudite professor or high-pitched priest. He tolerated only believers, gesturing with agile fingers. Three doctorates, eight languages. He rarely stopped moving. He never stopped talking. It was exhausting.
He was then fifty-three. Difficult to imagine the younger and skinnier man of 1962, on tour in the Deep South with a tough Brooklyn chauffeur, as portrayed by the movie. Donald never spoke of this to me. He often spoke of the frustrations of being black. When I’d call him up and ask what he had to do, he’d invariably answer, “There are only two things I have to do. Stay black, and die.”
Race was never far from his mind. In 1961 Donald wrote, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story... Americans who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experiences, have therefore no way of assessing the experiences of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. Thus the idea of my music can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice.”
I am white, brought up in Georgia; that last clause broke my heart.
Shirley’s music has worn well. Though it can be precious or bombastic, most of the time it remains fresh and audacious. Donald was right: the tradition of American song is richer than one might suppose.
He grew up a prodigy, son of comfortable Jamaican parents in Pensacola, Florida (his father was an Episcopal minister; his mother, a teacher, died when he was nine; his three brothers became doctors), then attended Catholic University in D.C. He declared his presence at eighteen with the Tchaikowsky Concerto and the Boston Pops. Mid-century America wasn’t ready for a black concert pianist, even represented by Sol Hurok. He was told to go into jazz or pop.
At the height of his career, the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, he played three hundred concerts a year. When I knew him, he was down to a handful.
“Nightclubs are toilets,” he liked to say. He avoided them. Many of his versions of standards show a tendency to merge the classics, which Donald had grown up in, with more customary idioms. He called his versions “transcriptions,” but they’re more like sympathetic re-compositions. Thus his I Cover the Waterfront contains passages from Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l'Ocean,” and his I Understand is constructed upon a Schubert impromptu. Today this seems a party trick, an attempt to avoid handling this material as jazz. But it’s much, much deeper than that.
Donald had an uneasy relationship with jazz. He often did a comic imitation at the keyboard of the latest hotshot. He admired Art Tatum, and was pallbearer for both Billie Holiday and Bill Evans; we went one evening to hear the master pianist Ellis Larkins, who was flummoxed to see him. Donald’s trio consisted of piano, bass, and cello; each player’s part was written; there was no improvisation. (Indeed, Donald argued there was no true improvisation in jazz, since everybody agreed beforehand on the harmonies.) Though Donald felt the concert stage was too stuffy, he had a horror of the informality of the jazz club. “I don’t want someone to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby!’”
After a career as a jazz musician, I can say with confidence that he was partly wrong. Though it’s recognized more in practice than in theory, jazz does involve improvised variations on a theme. (See Gunther Schuller’s 1958 analysis of Sonny Rollins’ Blue Seven.) Donald often aptly decried jazz musicians’ lazy ignorance of classical music. He recounted with glee having played a recent Stravinsky prelude for Miles Davis, who committed the unpardonable sin of not recognizing it.
Donald had nothing against improvisation; “I improvise very well,” he’d say. And he did: I once brought him a fugue subject, and watched him improvise a four-voice fugue after subtly improving the original theme. (I wondered whether to ask him to explain what he’d done.) He was at heart an organist, with one foot in the Baroque; his Lullaby of Birdland treats the melody as a fugue. He conceived of the piano as a stringed instrument and of his trio as one enormous stringed instrument. He was writing chamber music. This is evident in his trio setting of I Can’t Get Started by Vernon Duke (real name: Vladimir Dukelsky), which sounds like missing pages from a Rachmaninoff piano trio.
I never found out the source of his prodigious bravura technique; he never discussed his teachers, though he’d done a long seminar with “Mr. Rachmaninoff.” Perhaps, like all virtuosi, he simply bought it from his body with hard work. He did recommend a wonderful, neglected book, Music At Your Fingertips, by the piano teacher Ruth Slenzynka. It’s full of solid advice for any instrumentalist.
Donald used to slip from his studio into the back seats of Carnegie Hall so he could listen with disdain. “Audiences must like watching bad pianists move their fingers.” One afternoon he showed me a knotty passage from a Beethoven sonata that he was practicing; most of his colleagues cheated on the passage. Gulda and Entremont were notable exceptions. He spoke with derision of André Watts, who enjoyed the career that Donald was denied thirty years earlier. A tragedy of his career is that so few classical recordings exist.
Beyond his talent for embodying the African-American experience in music (try his trio’s Water Boy), Donald’s genius lay in an ability to find the hidden personality of musical material. (Try his solo LP of spirituals.) He extended this sympathy to standards: his Blue Skies evokes the Russian heritage of its composer, Irving Berlin. He was especially insightful about the works of George Gershwin. When I knew him, Donald was working on a way to play both the piano part to Rhapsody In Blue—which he performed many times—along with a compressed version of the orchestral part. At the keyboard, he was afraid of nothing.
One overlooked treasure from his extensive discography is a 1962 LP with the forgotten soprano Martha Flowers—“the alternate, not the understudy, for Leontyne Price.” It’s a convincing foray of an opera singer into popular material. The disc also features the finest trio performance of the Porgy and Bess Medley.
Much can be gleaned from examining his two recordings of The Man I Love, done about a decade apart. In the latter, the melody is played, with arpeggio accompaniment, by left hand alone. (In performance he’d drop his right hand to his side.) I believe Donald was influenced by James Joyce, whom he admired greatly; the core of both versions seems to mimic the “Oxen of the Sun” passage from Ulysses, in which Joyce systematically exploits all the styles of English prose in chronological order. Donald does the same for his variations, from Baroque to classical to romantic to modern. It’s up to you to follow the stylistic shifts, since he makes it all sound logical and natural.
Donald taught me—and one lesson of “Green Book” is—we must constantly open ourselves to the diversity of expression offered by artists. There ought to be room in the society for everybody. We mustn’t congratulate ourselves that today a Shirley would be encouraged, even welcomed, upon the classical stage. Often the rarest butterflies go extinct. But had Donald been allowed to be a concert pianist, we would not have the world of unique music he left us. As the expression goes, “You can’t have it both ways. The butter, and the money for the butter.” This country is very hard on its originals.
The African-American pianist Don Shirley wouldn’t be surprised that the country he loved was prepared to embrace a screen version of his prickly persona rather than grapple with the societal questions raised by his music.
Decades ago, before I moved overseas, for several years we were very good friends. I met Donald (“I’m not a Don. That’s a stage name.”) in 1980. I’d just graduated from Yale, and made my way to Manhattan to seek my fortune as an artist. I was a classical as well as a jazz guitarist; the combination was much rarer then. I’d been a music major at Yale and was still studying composition. In those days, the famous were more accessible than now. I looked up Shirley in the phone book—he was unlisted—then called the Musicians’ Union.
I’d discovered his music by accident, haunting a used-record shop near my college apartment. That solo 1955 LP was one of his best: his improvised sonata on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld. I was attracted to the formality of his approach as well as the kudos of the notoriously hard-to-please Igor Stravinsky (“His virtuosity is worthy of gods.”). The music, by turns dreamily lavish or austerely rational, thrilled me.
I was particularly taken by how this fellow Shirley suggested the Underworld from the very get-go, restating his opening theme in the parallel minor tonality, then using that idea throughout the sonata. This organic architecture appealed enormously.
Donald asked me to drop by for a chat. He lived in a “studio” above Carnegie Hall. (After nearly fifty years, he moved out just before his death.) The high-ceilinged place was vast, ornate, a silk-and-antique extravaganza, hung with billowy drapes and festooned with candles and bric-a-brac. It seemed a temple consecrated to the Steinway grand. Donald was big, shaven-headed, with a misleadingly sinister mustache. He spoke regally and softly, an erudite professor or high-pitched priest. He tolerated only believers, gesturing with agile fingers. Three doctorates, eight languages. He rarely stopped moving. He never stopped talking. It was exhausting.
He was then fifty-three. Difficult to imagine the younger and skinnier man of 1962, on tour in the Deep South with a tough Brooklyn chauffeur, as portrayed by the movie. Donald never spoke of this to me. He often spoke of the frustrations of being black. When I’d call him up and ask what he had to do, he’d invariably answer, “There are only two things I have to do. Stay black, and die.”
Race was never far from his mind. In 1961 Donald wrote, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story... Americans who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experiences, have therefore no way of assessing the experiences of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. Thus the idea of my music can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice.”
I am white, brought up in Georgia; that last clause broke my heart.
Shirley’s music has worn well. Though it can be precious or bombastic, most of the time it remains fresh and audacious. Donald was right: the tradition of American song is richer than one might suppose.
He grew up a prodigy, son of comfortable Jamaican parents in Pensacola, Florida (his father was an Episcopal minister; his mother, a teacher, died when he was nine; his three brothers became doctors), then attended Catholic University in D.C. He declared his presence at eighteen with the Tchaikowsky Concerto and the Boston Pops. Mid-century America wasn’t ready for a black concert pianist, even represented by Sol Hurok. He was told to go into jazz or pop.
At the height of his career, the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, he played three hundred concerts a year. When I knew him, he was down to a handful.
“Nightclubs are toilets,” he liked to say. He avoided them. Many of his versions of standards show a tendency to merge the classics, which Donald had grown up in, with more customary idioms. He called his versions “transcriptions,” but they’re more like sympathetic re-compositions. Thus his I Cover the Waterfront contains passages from Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l'Ocean,” and his I Understand is constructed upon a Schubert impromptu. Today this seems a party trick, an attempt to avoid handling this material as jazz. But it’s much, much deeper than that.
Donald had an uneasy relationship with jazz. He often did a comic imitation at the keyboard of the latest hotshot. He admired Art Tatum, and was pallbearer for both Billie Holiday and Bill Evans; we went one evening to hear the master pianist Ellis Larkins, who was flummoxed to see him. Donald’s trio consisted of piano, bass, and cello; each player’s part was written; there was no improvisation. (Indeed, Donald argued there was no true improvisation in jazz, since everybody agreed beforehand on the harmonies.) Though Donald felt the concert stage was too stuffy, he had a horror of the informality of the jazz club. “I don’t want someone to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby!’”
After a career as a jazz musician, I can say with confidence that he was partly wrong. Though it’s recognized more in practice than in theory, jazz does involve improvised variations on a theme. (See Gunther Schuller’s 1958 analysis of Sonny Rollins’ Blue Seven.) Donald often aptly decried jazz musicians’ lazy ignorance of classical music. He recounted with glee having played a recent Stravinsky prelude for Miles Davis, who committed the unpardonable sin of not recognizing it.
Donald had nothing against improvisation; “I improvise very well,” he’d say. And he did: I once brought him a fugue subject, and watched him improvise a four-voice fugue after subtly improving the original theme. (I wondered whether to ask him to explain what he’d done.) He was at heart an organist, with one foot in the Baroque; his Lullaby of Birdland treats the melody as a fugue. He conceived of the piano as a stringed instrument and of his trio as one enormous stringed instrument. He was writing chamber music. This is evident in his trio setting of I Can’t Get Started by Vernon Duke (real name: Vladimir Dukelsky), which sounds like missing pages from a Rachmaninoff piano trio.
I never found out the source of his prodigious bravura technique; he never discussed his teachers, though he’d done a long seminar with “Mr. Rachmaninoff.” Perhaps, like all virtuosi, he simply bought it from his body with hard work. He did recommend a wonderful, neglected book, Music At Your Fingertips, by the piano teacher Ruth Slenzynka. It’s full of solid advice for any instrumentalist.
Donald used to slip from his studio into the back seats of Carnegie Hall so he could listen with disdain. “Audiences must like watching bad pianists move their fingers.” One afternoon he showed me a knotty passage from a Beethoven sonata that he was practicing; most of his colleagues cheated on the passage. Gulda and Entremont were notable exceptions. He spoke with derision of André Watts, who enjoyed the career that Donald was denied thirty years earlier. A tragedy of his career is that so few classical recordings exist.
Beyond his talent for embodying the African-American experience in music (try his trio’s Water Boy), Donald’s genius lay in an ability to find the hidden personality of musical material. (Try his solo LP of spirituals.) He extended this sympathy to standards: his Blue Skies evokes the Russian heritage of its composer, Irving Berlin. He was especially insightful about the works of George Gershwin. When I knew him, Donald was working on a way to play both the piano part to Rhapsody In Blue—which he performed many times—along with a compressed version of the orchestral part. At the keyboard, he was afraid of nothing.
One overlooked treasure from his extensive discography is a 1962 LP with the forgotten soprano Martha Flowers—“the alternate, not the understudy, for Leontyne Price.” It’s a convincing foray of an opera singer into popular material. The disc also features the finest trio performance of the Porgy and Bess Medley.
Much can be gleaned from examining his two recordings of The Man I Love, done about a decade apart. In the latter, the melody is played, with arpeggio accompaniment, by left hand alone. (In performance he’d drop his right hand to his side.) I believe Donald was influenced by James Joyce, whom he admired greatly; the core of both versions seems to mimic the “Oxen of the Sun” passage from Ulysses, in which Joyce systematically exploits all the styles of English prose in chronological order. Donald does the same for his variations, from Baroque to classical to romantic to modern. It’s up to you to follow the stylistic shifts, since he makes it all sound logical and natural.
Donald taught me—and one lesson of “Green Book” is—we must constantly open ourselves to the diversity of expression offered by artists. There ought to be room in the society for everybody. We mustn’t congratulate ourselves that today a Shirley would be encouraged, even welcomed, upon the classical stage. Often the rarest butterflies go extinct. But had Donald been allowed to be a concert pianist, we would not have the world of unique music he left us. As the expression goes, “You can’t have it both ways. The butter, and the money for the butter.” This country is very hard on its originals.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
GUEST BLOG #4: Rex Baird
A close friend of many years, Rex Baird is one of the most literary-minded people I know, and the most insightful and knowledgeable about film. The following excerpt is from his superb memoir of the 1950s and '60s, The Work of Moths.
Rex Baird is a former bartender, English teacher, speechwriter and running shoe rep turned neuromuscular massage therapist and personal trainer. Although his job history has varied, his love of golf and movies has remained constant despite the humility of higher scores and the impossibility of finding a decent drive-in.
In the early 60s, I had a high school-friend Norm who was a Lucky Strike man. Like my mother Jane, he was proud of his brand. Both Luckies and Camels were considered the serious smoker's choice. Filters were for dilettantes.
Norm, a member of the golf team, spoke in a double-negative-laden-pseudo-hipster lingo. When I signed up for tryouts simply to take advantage of the ten-cent greens fee offered to the team by a local municipal course, Norm chastised me. “It’s a lie you aren’t in it for the dime time.”
During my teenaged years, my parents rented a summerhouse next to a golf course on Cape Cod. My father preferred to stay in Boston and would travel down by train only on the occasional weekend. It wasn’t hard convincing Norm to visit. We could ogle girls on the beach every morning and play golf in the afternoon. Better yet, with my traditionally strict father out of the picture, we could drink as many as two beers at night with my mother’s blessing. “It’ll put hair on you chest,” she told us.
Because he admired Arnold Palmer, Norm mimicked Arnie's golf swing and his smoking style. Before every shot he'd take a big drag, then launch his Lucky off to the side with a practiced flick of thumb and index finger. After each shot, he'd retrieve the butt and smoke it out of the corner of his mouth like a racetrack tout as he strutted down the fairway.
Norm's pantomime was accurate but a bit too hammy for my taste, and rather silly coming from a fifteen-year-old. We were playing late one afternoon under heavy storm clouds. Norm's histrionics were slowing our progress.
When the first few raindrops fell, I'd had enough. "Hey Arnie," I said, “are you a smoker or a golfer?"
Norm--all 5'4" and 120 pounds--looked at me sideways with his version of menace. "It's a lie I can't smoke you in golf and out smoke your mother."
The first boast was debatable; the second, ludicrous. The rain was falling harder now, and as we hustled down the seventeenth fairway, I formulated a plan. "Let’s hit the drive-in tonight and you can go one on one with Jane. Just smoke a Lucky for each of her Camels. Think you can handle it, big man?"
My strategy was fiendish. Norm was sensitive about his height. I knew smoking made him feel bigger, or at least older. I also knew he was worried it would "stunt his growth." This kind of internal conflict could only weaken his resolve. His obsession with turning sixteen so he could get his driver's license would make going to the drive-in with my mother behind the wheel a demeaning experience.
The seventeenth green bordered a graveyard. Why not dig the needle a little deeper? As Norm set up over his putt, a twisty, downhill six-footer, I pointed toward the tombstones. "Try to go ten rounds with Jane, and that's where you'll end up, Lucky man."
Norm glowered. The Lucky, which he'd forgotten to flick away, was dangling from his lip. As he looked down at his ball, the smoke trailed up toward his eyes. He stabbed his putt and it ran through the break, coming to rest eight feet below the hole. This was going to be fun.
On the way to the drive-in that night, Norm oozed the false bravado of a promising middleweight trying to move up a couple of classes to fight the heavyweight champ. We agreed he’d sit in the front seat with Jane so he could pace himself appropriately. The bucket seat restrained his natural hyperactivity. I sensed he wanted to pace back and forth and shadow box to release his pre-fight jitters.
The feature that night was The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. The rain had intensified, and when the previews began I could see rivulets cascading down the screen.
Jane set a blistering early pace. If she’d been in our living room watching a movie on TV, she’d have rested her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. But the ashtray in the T-Bird was small, and hard to find in the dark. So the Camel never left Jane's hand. And the car's cigarette lighter was broken, so Jane simply used the butt of her first Camel to light the second.
Jane's first Camel expired in just over twelve minutes. From the back seat, I could see Norm concealing his mimicry by taking a drag ten or fifteen seconds after Jane's lead. Their battle was taking its toll on me. The car was quickly filling with dense smoke that obscured the screen, but I couldn't crack the rear window more than an inch without getting soaked.
To make matters worse, the rain pelting the roof of the car muffled the sound from the tinny drive-in speaker hanging inside the window. The movie, which I now could neither see nor hear clearly, had become merely a backdrop for the smoking contest. My eyes were beginning to water, and the billowing clouds had reached a toxic level. I could still make out William Holden's faint onscreen image holding a cigarette. Jane responded by smoking faster. Less than twenty minutes into the contest, Norm was on the ropes.
He threw in the towel after the third cigarette. "I'm forlorn if I don't get some corn," he wheezed as he bolted out the door into the deluge.
I translated for Jane. "Norm said he wants some popcorn."
Jane looked perplexed. "That Norm's a strange boy. He's going to get soaked to his skin."
Norm had been gone for twenty minutes when Jane suggested I investigate. I hesitated. I didn't want to get drenched, and didn't relish the idea of finding Norm bent over a public toilet. Jane turned toward me and raised her left eyebrow. This was a sign of intimidation she admitted she'd practiced for months as a teenager. It worked; I departed at a gallop.
Norm was huddled under the roof of the concession building. He looked, as Jane might have put it, "a little green under the gills." It could have been the fluorescent lights, but I doubted it.
"It's a lie that wasn't fume doom," Norm said, shaking his head like a fighter just revived with smelling salts.
He looked so miserable I didn't have the heart to rub it in. "I told you she was tough. You wouldn't expect to outdrive Nicklaus, would you? And hey, smoking Luckies is like playing from the pro tees."
"I guess, so," he said, still shaking his head. "But I'm a doubtful starter for the back nine." This was Normspeak for I quit.
"Tell you what. I'll complain about the smoke. Maybe she’ll tone it down a little."
Jane did slow down, and the rain stopped, allowing us to open the car windows. Norm didn't smoke another Lucky all night, and the next day on the golf course he lit up only once. A few months later at a high school assembly, we watched an anti-smoking film featuring pictures of tar-coated and cancerous lungs. Norm made a vow to quit--which he soon broke--but at least he cut back.
Even after losing a breast to cancer in 1983, Jane didn’t moderate her three-pack-a-day habit. It took a stroke, ten years later, to put a cramp in her style.
Rex Baird is a former bartender, English teacher, speechwriter and running shoe rep turned neuromuscular massage therapist and personal trainer. Although his job history has varied, his love of golf and movies has remained constant despite the humility of higher scores and the impossibility of finding a decent drive-in.
In the early 60s, I had a high school-friend Norm who was a Lucky Strike man. Like my mother Jane, he was proud of his brand. Both Luckies and Camels were considered the serious smoker's choice. Filters were for dilettantes.
Norm, a member of the golf team, spoke in a double-negative-laden-pseudo-hipster lingo. When I signed up for tryouts simply to take advantage of the ten-cent greens fee offered to the team by a local municipal course, Norm chastised me. “It’s a lie you aren’t in it for the dime time.”
During my teenaged years, my parents rented a summerhouse next to a golf course on Cape Cod. My father preferred to stay in Boston and would travel down by train only on the occasional weekend. It wasn’t hard convincing Norm to visit. We could ogle girls on the beach every morning and play golf in the afternoon. Better yet, with my traditionally strict father out of the picture, we could drink as many as two beers at night with my mother’s blessing. “It’ll put hair on you chest,” she told us.
Because he admired Arnold Palmer, Norm mimicked Arnie's golf swing and his smoking style. Before every shot he'd take a big drag, then launch his Lucky off to the side with a practiced flick of thumb and index finger. After each shot, he'd retrieve the butt and smoke it out of the corner of his mouth like a racetrack tout as he strutted down the fairway.
Norm's pantomime was accurate but a bit too hammy for my taste, and rather silly coming from a fifteen-year-old. We were playing late one afternoon under heavy storm clouds. Norm's histrionics were slowing our progress.
When the first few raindrops fell, I'd had enough. "Hey Arnie," I said, “are you a smoker or a golfer?"
Norm--all 5'4" and 120 pounds--looked at me sideways with his version of menace. "It's a lie I can't smoke you in golf and out smoke your mother."
The first boast was debatable; the second, ludicrous. The rain was falling harder now, and as we hustled down the seventeenth fairway, I formulated a plan. "Let’s hit the drive-in tonight and you can go one on one with Jane. Just smoke a Lucky for each of her Camels. Think you can handle it, big man?"
My strategy was fiendish. Norm was sensitive about his height. I knew smoking made him feel bigger, or at least older. I also knew he was worried it would "stunt his growth." This kind of internal conflict could only weaken his resolve. His obsession with turning sixteen so he could get his driver's license would make going to the drive-in with my mother behind the wheel a demeaning experience.
The seventeenth green bordered a graveyard. Why not dig the needle a little deeper? As Norm set up over his putt, a twisty, downhill six-footer, I pointed toward the tombstones. "Try to go ten rounds with Jane, and that's where you'll end up, Lucky man."
Norm glowered. The Lucky, which he'd forgotten to flick away, was dangling from his lip. As he looked down at his ball, the smoke trailed up toward his eyes. He stabbed his putt and it ran through the break, coming to rest eight feet below the hole. This was going to be fun.
On the way to the drive-in that night, Norm oozed the false bravado of a promising middleweight trying to move up a couple of classes to fight the heavyweight champ. We agreed he’d sit in the front seat with Jane so he could pace himself appropriately. The bucket seat restrained his natural hyperactivity. I sensed he wanted to pace back and forth and shadow box to release his pre-fight jitters.
The feature that night was The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. The rain had intensified, and when the previews began I could see rivulets cascading down the screen.
Jane set a blistering early pace. If she’d been in our living room watching a movie on TV, she’d have rested her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. But the ashtray in the T-Bird was small, and hard to find in the dark. So the Camel never left Jane's hand. And the car's cigarette lighter was broken, so Jane simply used the butt of her first Camel to light the second.
Jane's first Camel expired in just over twelve minutes. From the back seat, I could see Norm concealing his mimicry by taking a drag ten or fifteen seconds after Jane's lead. Their battle was taking its toll on me. The car was quickly filling with dense smoke that obscured the screen, but I couldn't crack the rear window more than an inch without getting soaked.
To make matters worse, the rain pelting the roof of the car muffled the sound from the tinny drive-in speaker hanging inside the window. The movie, which I now could neither see nor hear clearly, had become merely a backdrop for the smoking contest. My eyes were beginning to water, and the billowing clouds had reached a toxic level. I could still make out William Holden's faint onscreen image holding a cigarette. Jane responded by smoking faster. Less than twenty minutes into the contest, Norm was on the ropes.
He threw in the towel after the third cigarette. "I'm forlorn if I don't get some corn," he wheezed as he bolted out the door into the deluge.
I translated for Jane. "Norm said he wants some popcorn."
Jane looked perplexed. "That Norm's a strange boy. He's going to get soaked to his skin."
Norm had been gone for twenty minutes when Jane suggested I investigate. I hesitated. I didn't want to get drenched, and didn't relish the idea of finding Norm bent over a public toilet. Jane turned toward me and raised her left eyebrow. This was a sign of intimidation she admitted she'd practiced for months as a teenager. It worked; I departed at a gallop.
Norm was huddled under the roof of the concession building. He looked, as Jane might have put it, "a little green under the gills." It could have been the fluorescent lights, but I doubted it.
"It's a lie that wasn't fume doom," Norm said, shaking his head like a fighter just revived with smelling salts.
He looked so miserable I didn't have the heart to rub it in. "I told you she was tough. You wouldn't expect to outdrive Nicklaus, would you? And hey, smoking Luckies is like playing from the pro tees."
"I guess, so," he said, still shaking his head. "But I'm a doubtful starter for the back nine." This was Normspeak for I quit.
"Tell you what. I'll complain about the smoke. Maybe she’ll tone it down a little."
Jane did slow down, and the rain stopped, allowing us to open the car windows. Norm didn't smoke another Lucky all night, and the next day on the golf course he lit up only once. A few months later at a high school assembly, we watched an anti-smoking film featuring pictures of tar-coated and cancerous lungs. Norm made a vow to quit--which he soon broke--but at least he cut back.
Even after losing a breast to cancer in 1983, Jane didn’t moderate her three-pack-a-day habit. It took a stroke, ten years later, to put a cramp in her style.
Sunday, March 23, 2003
Bermuda
Written in 2003 for the New York Times Magazine
Location is everything. Ever since childhood, my idea of islands was tropical, or at least Mediterranean, so I’d always been skeptical of Bermuda, only two hours’ flight from New York. It never occurred to me that here was an island with virtually no resources, a lump twenty-two miles square in the middle of the Atlantic, which had traded for generations on little more than ingenuity and beauty to create a calm, prosperous society.
As one of Britain’s earliest colonies, on the same subtropical latitude as Shanghai and Charleston, Bermuda enjoys a fiscal Gulf Stream of its own creation. When I arrived, the place struck me as highly British—from the pillar postboxes to the serenely assured, idiosyncratic architecture—but it became less so the longer I stayed, and began to sense what being Bermudian (that floral word) means.
The surprise comes from what the island is not. It is not greedy, not poor, not full of junky T-shirt kiosks. Its high season is April through November, not the reverse. There are no casinos. It does not allow tourists to rent cars, which keeps down the traffic, encourages bicycles or motor-scooters, and guarantees work for the taxi drivers incessantly polishing their shiny vans. Less starchy than guidebooks would have you believe, it is unfailingly polite.
Best of all, unlike many small places with a deep colonial past, it never feels like a client state, a humbled dependent. Bermudians resent being lumped with “the other islands” and will remind you, with a relaxed pride, that they’re as distant from the West Indies as Washington is from Dallas. They know they are more worldly, more well-spoken, more well-off. And they pay no taxes.
Visitors come for the plentiful beaches, which are Caribbean-lovely, and for the golf courses. But the island now earns far more from the trickle-down of offshore businesses and insurance than from tourism. Locals call it a virtual economy, afloat on the billions flowing through daily, just as it once rode the currents of other ideas it got to first— resort tourism, or trade with the U.S. in a commodity like Revolutionary War gunpowder, Civil War rifles, Prohibition rum, or Bermuda onions.
Another first, I’d hazard, is that the premier is a black woman who succeeded another black woman.
Like Gibraltar, it really is a rock: all water comes from the sky, collected deftly off the ridged roofs, and residents speak of Rock Fever from not getting away enough. Bermudians do tend to live elsewhere for years, then return, and one result is an unplaceable oceanic accent, neither British nor American nor Caribbean, to which everyone seems to give a uniquely different inflection.
The broad ethnic mix of the island can be grasped in any large supermarket. Alongside a wall of British jams and marmalades, for example, are Greek, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and Caribbean sauces, spices, or chutneys. The frequency of a red bean soup on menus will remind you that a quarter of the population is, in some Bermudian sense, Portuguese. There’s a long tradition of Italian restaurants; as locals say, the Italians lost the Second World War, so they decided to conquer Bermuda.
I was happy to meet up in Hamilton, the intimate capital, with an old friend. John Zuill is a fourteenth-generation Bermudian I’d known back in the U.S., now co-director of a theater company, Waterspout, whose current season included Mishima, Mamet, and Shakespeare. Over coffee we talked about The Tempest—the play’s shipwreck was prompted by one here in 1609—and gazed toward the harbor. Often people came over to greet Zuill, which he made light of.
“People on Bermuda have to say hello to everyone they know, or they’re in trouble. There’s not enough room for people not to live together, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. So there’s a wide range of toleration, a pragmatic acceptance of eccentric behavior. You can be different—just don’t mention it. Whatever you do will be forgiven, but it won’t be forgotten.
“The key to Bermuda has always been that unless you apply your wits, there’s nothing here. All we have are sunshine and brains. There was never any money to be made here unless you were actually here. There weren’t estates to control from afar; there wasn’t even fresh water. The slaves weren’t plantation labor, because there weren’t any plantations—they had specific skills. Cabinet makers, carpenters, whatever. And a lot of big ideas, like coffee or rubber or onions, failed. So in the end, nothing’s made here. But as long as the U.S. and European tax codes don’t change, we probably have a secure future.”
One deep Bermudian tradition is the nickname. As John said, “You get it young, usually from your friends, not your parents, and it sticks, to the point where nobody can remember where it came from.” It’s not unusual to read an obituary in The Royal Gazette that begins: “Muriel, beloved wife of the late Charles (Sheik), mother of Howard (Boxhead), friend of Alma (Champ).... ” Then turn to the Letters page, and enter an extremely eloquent maelstrom.
Yet there’s nothing “wild” about Bermuda; it’s a highly cultivated island in every sense, careful to dispel any unpredictable sexiness in its ads, relying on the affection of repeat visitors who aren’t seeking adventure. As I wound from parish to parish, either coast road instead offered a sea crashing mildly on the rocks, the lilt of gospel halls, tilled tomato fields nestled in palms, fresh fish or lilies for sale beside the limestone walls and low shuttered houses— some in pinks or cream yellows, some in sorbets of grape, peach, mango. As Winslow Homer proved here in 1899, there is still an immortal calm in the watercolor disarray of a cove, a spit of beach, a peeling red-and-white wooden boat leaned on pale sand and fallen fronds, while an ever-changing force of intensifying blue moves horizonward.
Bermuda’s style is a gentle truce of climate and empire: formally relaxed. In Hamilton, you’d never guess that 13,000 registered companies are squeezed into those scalloped stucco buildings of yesteryear with their breezy wooden verandas. During the hot months, business attire for men becomes tie, jacket, shorts, and knee socks. For lawyers, it’s a half-wig and robes; for magistrates, the full wig. “Never mind summer,” one eminent lawyer told me. “You’re itchy in any weather in all that clobber.”
If you amble by the Hamilton shops once known as The Forty Thieves, on Reid or Front Streets, “the City” (pop. 1,100) feels resolutely upmarket, though without the posh of, say, St. Bart’s. The emporiums still bear family names: Trimingham’s (est. 1844), Smith’s (est. 1889), A. J. Cooper (est. 1897) with its surprising Wedgwood door handles. A world of Irish linen, not sunstruck flesh; indeed, one day I saw a young woman in a rare miniskirt stared at en masse—not in disapproval, but amazement.
My favorite nook was on Queen Street, just below the graceful shade of Par-La-Ville Park. This was the Perot Post Office with its white walls and black shutters, its native orchids in planters, its slots marked Local / Boat /Airmail. Perot, the first postmaster, had also built a large home behind a big rubber tree next door, now a museum of the Bermuda Historical Society. I stopped in to see his first stamp (1848), of which only eleven exist, and found Colin Benbow, dapper in blue Bermuda shorts and knee socks. A history teacher since the 1950s, Benbow is known as a fount of local knowledge.
“Two samples of the stamp left the island last month to go to auction,” he said drily, when I asked if he had one. “The last time, it fetched $300,000.” And what of the WWII spies, “the codebreakers with shapely ankles”—those thousand-odd young women who read the transatlantic mail borrowed off the flying boats that stopped to fuel up here? “They lived at the Princess Hotel, and worked across the street at the Bermudiana. It’s now six feet under a couple of vast re-insurance companies.”
Over in Somerset Village, nine miles west, I walked one of the most evocative stretches of the old railway trail. The “Rattle and Shake” train ran only from 1931-48, before being dismantled soon after cars were permitted on the island. The trail, paved now, wandered through foliage, past limestone shoulders, morning glories, and tart loquats which I picked and ate. Then it became a neighborhood road, behind little houses with boats in their gardens.
From Somerset Drawbridge—the world’s smallest, now never used, with an opening barely big enough for a ship’s mast—I took a chugging ferry up to the green island’s western tip, which locals call Dockyard. This sprawling stone fortress was the Royal Navy’s base from the early 1800s. Restored, with cannon lying about, it’s still active as a boatyard. A Maritime Museum has exhibits from 16th century shipwrecks to 1930s cruise ships to the Bermuda dinghy, that fourteen-foot anomaly with an absurdly tall mast, a huge sail, and an inexplicable way of cutting rapidly through rather than over the water. This means one man bails nonstop; in a race, crew members are eventually allowed to jump overboard.
Nearby, in the grandiose Commissioner’s House, the displays devoted to the slave trade, complete with shackles and collars, were enough to make me want to go stand in the sunshine and weep. At least Bermuda was one of only two colonies to immediately free its 4,200 slaves in 1834, right after the decree of abolition—about half the island’s population.
At the island’s eastern end, I spent a day exploring the slow lanes of St. George, the first settlement—preserved cottages in lime, lemon, mustard, salmon, set amid palms on Featherbed Alley, Barber’s Alley, Pound Alley, Princess Street. It has its personalized museums, from Tucker House with a George III chamberpot hidden in a mahogany chest of drawers, to the Globe Hotel where blockade runners conspired to outfox Union ships, to a homespun Black History Museum with mementos of cricket teams and a diorama of the slave trade using children’s dolls, to a wharfside Town Hall with its signed, faded portraits of Elizabeth and Philip. And there is St. Peter’s, the hemisphere’s oldest Anglican church continuously in use, its interior rich with the cigar-box fragrance of local cedar. In the churchyard, past graves shaped like picnic tables, lies a slaves’ burial ground of smudged irregular headstones.
Bermuda is small, but on the other hand, I haven’t seen anywhere else this large without any ugliness. I hadn’t expected such a diverse and amiable island, with none of the historical darkness of disenfranchised peoples that one often senses in the Caribbean. Go for a walk in Hamilton up Cedar Avenue, past the Queen’s Club, past a church of Christian Scientists and a house of Bahai’is, to the Catholic Cathedral and its convent next door—now a mosque. Or, better yet, take a morning stroll in Victoria Park to see the black, white, Asian schoolkids, of every continental extraction and possible mix, hollering and playing hand-in-hand—just as, in the Botanical Gardens, I came upon a gigantic banyan tree, with innumerable, ever-multiplying downward roots.
Location is everything. Ever since childhood, my idea of islands was tropical, or at least Mediterranean, so I’d always been skeptical of Bermuda, only two hours’ flight from New York. It never occurred to me that here was an island with virtually no resources, a lump twenty-two miles square in the middle of the Atlantic, which had traded for generations on little more than ingenuity and beauty to create a calm, prosperous society.
As one of Britain’s earliest colonies, on the same subtropical latitude as Shanghai and Charleston, Bermuda enjoys a fiscal Gulf Stream of its own creation. When I arrived, the place struck me as highly British—from the pillar postboxes to the serenely assured, idiosyncratic architecture—but it became less so the longer I stayed, and began to sense what being Bermudian (that floral word) means.
The surprise comes from what the island is not. It is not greedy, not poor, not full of junky T-shirt kiosks. Its high season is April through November, not the reverse. There are no casinos. It does not allow tourists to rent cars, which keeps down the traffic, encourages bicycles or motor-scooters, and guarantees work for the taxi drivers incessantly polishing their shiny vans. Less starchy than guidebooks would have you believe, it is unfailingly polite.
Best of all, unlike many small places with a deep colonial past, it never feels like a client state, a humbled dependent. Bermudians resent being lumped with “the other islands” and will remind you, with a relaxed pride, that they’re as distant from the West Indies as Washington is from Dallas. They know they are more worldly, more well-spoken, more well-off. And they pay no taxes.
Visitors come for the plentiful beaches, which are Caribbean-lovely, and for the golf courses. But the island now earns far more from the trickle-down of offshore businesses and insurance than from tourism. Locals call it a virtual economy, afloat on the billions flowing through daily, just as it once rode the currents of other ideas it got to first— resort tourism, or trade with the U.S. in a commodity like Revolutionary War gunpowder, Civil War rifles, Prohibition rum, or Bermuda onions.
Another first, I’d hazard, is that the premier is a black woman who succeeded another black woman.
Like Gibraltar, it really is a rock: all water comes from the sky, collected deftly off the ridged roofs, and residents speak of Rock Fever from not getting away enough. Bermudians do tend to live elsewhere for years, then return, and one result is an unplaceable oceanic accent, neither British nor American nor Caribbean, to which everyone seems to give a uniquely different inflection.
The broad ethnic mix of the island can be grasped in any large supermarket. Alongside a wall of British jams and marmalades, for example, are Greek, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and Caribbean sauces, spices, or chutneys. The frequency of a red bean soup on menus will remind you that a quarter of the population is, in some Bermudian sense, Portuguese. There’s a long tradition of Italian restaurants; as locals say, the Italians lost the Second World War, so they decided to conquer Bermuda.
I was happy to meet up in Hamilton, the intimate capital, with an old friend. John Zuill is a fourteenth-generation Bermudian I’d known back in the U.S., now co-director of a theater company, Waterspout, whose current season included Mishima, Mamet, and Shakespeare. Over coffee we talked about The Tempest—the play’s shipwreck was prompted by one here in 1609—and gazed toward the harbor. Often people came over to greet Zuill, which he made light of.
“People on Bermuda have to say hello to everyone they know, or they’re in trouble. There’s not enough room for people not to live together, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. So there’s a wide range of toleration, a pragmatic acceptance of eccentric behavior. You can be different—just don’t mention it. Whatever you do will be forgiven, but it won’t be forgotten.
“The key to Bermuda has always been that unless you apply your wits, there’s nothing here. All we have are sunshine and brains. There was never any money to be made here unless you were actually here. There weren’t estates to control from afar; there wasn’t even fresh water. The slaves weren’t plantation labor, because there weren’t any plantations—they had specific skills. Cabinet makers, carpenters, whatever. And a lot of big ideas, like coffee or rubber or onions, failed. So in the end, nothing’s made here. But as long as the U.S. and European tax codes don’t change, we probably have a secure future.”
One deep Bermudian tradition is the nickname. As John said, “You get it young, usually from your friends, not your parents, and it sticks, to the point where nobody can remember where it came from.” It’s not unusual to read an obituary in The Royal Gazette that begins: “Muriel, beloved wife of the late Charles (Sheik), mother of Howard (Boxhead), friend of Alma (Champ).... ” Then turn to the Letters page, and enter an extremely eloquent maelstrom.
Yet there’s nothing “wild” about Bermuda; it’s a highly cultivated island in every sense, careful to dispel any unpredictable sexiness in its ads, relying on the affection of repeat visitors who aren’t seeking adventure. As I wound from parish to parish, either coast road instead offered a sea crashing mildly on the rocks, the lilt of gospel halls, tilled tomato fields nestled in palms, fresh fish or lilies for sale beside the limestone walls and low shuttered houses— some in pinks or cream yellows, some in sorbets of grape, peach, mango. As Winslow Homer proved here in 1899, there is still an immortal calm in the watercolor disarray of a cove, a spit of beach, a peeling red-and-white wooden boat leaned on pale sand and fallen fronds, while an ever-changing force of intensifying blue moves horizonward.
Bermuda’s style is a gentle truce of climate and empire: formally relaxed. In Hamilton, you’d never guess that 13,000 registered companies are squeezed into those scalloped stucco buildings of yesteryear with their breezy wooden verandas. During the hot months, business attire for men becomes tie, jacket, shorts, and knee socks. For lawyers, it’s a half-wig and robes; for magistrates, the full wig. “Never mind summer,” one eminent lawyer told me. “You’re itchy in any weather in all that clobber.”
If you amble by the Hamilton shops once known as The Forty Thieves, on Reid or Front Streets, “the City” (pop. 1,100) feels resolutely upmarket, though without the posh of, say, St. Bart’s. The emporiums still bear family names: Trimingham’s (est. 1844), Smith’s (est. 1889), A. J. Cooper (est. 1897) with its surprising Wedgwood door handles. A world of Irish linen, not sunstruck flesh; indeed, one day I saw a young woman in a rare miniskirt stared at en masse—not in disapproval, but amazement.
My favorite nook was on Queen Street, just below the graceful shade of Par-La-Ville Park. This was the Perot Post Office with its white walls and black shutters, its native orchids in planters, its slots marked Local / Boat /Airmail. Perot, the first postmaster, had also built a large home behind a big rubber tree next door, now a museum of the Bermuda Historical Society. I stopped in to see his first stamp (1848), of which only eleven exist, and found Colin Benbow, dapper in blue Bermuda shorts and knee socks. A history teacher since the 1950s, Benbow is known as a fount of local knowledge.
“Two samples of the stamp left the island last month to go to auction,” he said drily, when I asked if he had one. “The last time, it fetched $300,000.” And what of the WWII spies, “the codebreakers with shapely ankles”—those thousand-odd young women who read the transatlantic mail borrowed off the flying boats that stopped to fuel up here? “They lived at the Princess Hotel, and worked across the street at the Bermudiana. It’s now six feet under a couple of vast re-insurance companies.”
Over in Somerset Village, nine miles west, I walked one of the most evocative stretches of the old railway trail. The “Rattle and Shake” train ran only from 1931-48, before being dismantled soon after cars were permitted on the island. The trail, paved now, wandered through foliage, past limestone shoulders, morning glories, and tart loquats which I picked and ate. Then it became a neighborhood road, behind little houses with boats in their gardens.
From Somerset Drawbridge—the world’s smallest, now never used, with an opening barely big enough for a ship’s mast—I took a chugging ferry up to the green island’s western tip, which locals call Dockyard. This sprawling stone fortress was the Royal Navy’s base from the early 1800s. Restored, with cannon lying about, it’s still active as a boatyard. A Maritime Museum has exhibits from 16th century shipwrecks to 1930s cruise ships to the Bermuda dinghy, that fourteen-foot anomaly with an absurdly tall mast, a huge sail, and an inexplicable way of cutting rapidly through rather than over the water. This means one man bails nonstop; in a race, crew members are eventually allowed to jump overboard.
Nearby, in the grandiose Commissioner’s House, the displays devoted to the slave trade, complete with shackles and collars, were enough to make me want to go stand in the sunshine and weep. At least Bermuda was one of only two colonies to immediately free its 4,200 slaves in 1834, right after the decree of abolition—about half the island’s population.
At the island’s eastern end, I spent a day exploring the slow lanes of St. George, the first settlement—preserved cottages in lime, lemon, mustard, salmon, set amid palms on Featherbed Alley, Barber’s Alley, Pound Alley, Princess Street. It has its personalized museums, from Tucker House with a George III chamberpot hidden in a mahogany chest of drawers, to the Globe Hotel where blockade runners conspired to outfox Union ships, to a homespun Black History Museum with mementos of cricket teams and a diorama of the slave trade using children’s dolls, to a wharfside Town Hall with its signed, faded portraits of Elizabeth and Philip. And there is St. Peter’s, the hemisphere’s oldest Anglican church continuously in use, its interior rich with the cigar-box fragrance of local cedar. In the churchyard, past graves shaped like picnic tables, lies a slaves’ burial ground of smudged irregular headstones.
Bermuda is small, but on the other hand, I haven’t seen anywhere else this large without any ugliness. I hadn’t expected such a diverse and amiable island, with none of the historical darkness of disenfranchised peoples that one often senses in the Caribbean. Go for a walk in Hamilton up Cedar Avenue, past the Queen’s Club, past a church of Christian Scientists and a house of Bahai’is, to the Catholic Cathedral and its convent next door—now a mosque. Or, better yet, take a morning stroll in Victoria Park to see the black, white, Asian schoolkids, of every continental extraction and possible mix, hollering and playing hand-in-hand—just as, in the Botanical Gardens, I came upon a gigantic banyan tree, with innumerable, ever-multiplying downward roots.
Friday, September 22, 2000
Lowell, Massachusetts
Written in 2000 for National Geographic Traveler magazine
I’ve always had trouble with New England mythologizing—the cookie-box history of tea overboard, revolutionary battles, moonlight rides. That frock-coat past usually seems as remote and romantic as a children’s storybook. Lowell, Massachusetts has another history entirely, of labor struggles amid the birth pangs of the industrial era. This was Jack Kerouac’s town, a riverside cluster of relentless textile mills “built in brick, primly towered, solid” that ate wave after wave of workers, prospered in the 19th century, and sank early in the 20th. Yet the city has recovered in the last twenty years, realizing its industrial role was something to be proud of, and facing its gritty labor history head-on.
Water helped make Lowell rich in the early 1800s. The original town was built on a crisscross of canals which—originally intended as a quicker route to the sea, and thence Boston—instead ended up harnessing vast water power.
Today’s Lowell didn’t at first strike me as particularly alluring, though I’ve never seen a city with so much preserved Americana in a compact space: luncheonettes with soda fountains straight out of my childhood, shoe-repair or optometrist shops that might as well have Eisenhower’s photo in the window. Then I began to notice how the downtown’s brick edifices have unexpectedly ornate flourishes, the detailed workmanship that comes from wealth building confidently in a boom time.
I didn’t have to walk far to find what had paid for it all: the long, red, many-windowed mills that straddle and overshadow the canals. Historic, industrial-era Lowell is a national park, and a park ranger named Alex Demas, in what was once the Boott Mill complex—now an extraordinary museum—taught me about a period I’d taken for granted.
Alex was in his fifties, a sturdy man with a gray beard and mustache, and a gentle sarcasm. He was also a natural explainer and performer. “I started as a countertenor in New York. I eventually became a bluegrass banjo picker, ended up in Boston’s coffeehouse scene, then moved to the Merrimack River Valley in 1974. I’ve been a ranger here since the park’s inception in ’78.” His performing life dovetailed nicely with his day job, since he could perform, say, a protest song composed by a Lowell “mill girl” in 1830 (I Am A Slave Girl) as part of a museum program. And he was a passionate explainer of that history.
According to Alex, “Lowell was the country’s first successful, planned industrial city.” In the early 19th century the American demand for British textiles was huge; one young Massachusetts gentleman managed a spying coup on England’s “dark satanic mills” and copied from memory their advanced machinery. He died before he saw Lowell (named for him) built as a factory metropolis by entrepreneurs who realized that its flowing canals could power thousands of looms.
The first workers were the so-called mill girls, age fifteen to thirty, off nearby New England farms, and as Alex pointed out, glad of the job. “They were away from their families, they were in an unimaginably big, clean city, they had hundreds of friends just like them, they were earning money. They would come work for a couple of years to earn their dowry, then go back to the farm and let their younger sister replace them.”
In 1826 Lowell had 2,500 inhabitants; by 1850 the number was up to 33,000. “The El Dorado on the Merrimack” seemed a bright vision of the country’s future, turning out two million yards of cloth each week in a fully integrated plan. Under one roof for the first time, raw cotton came in and eventually emerged as finished textiles—a brilliant, original American system. At first, Lowell appeared a model workers’ community, that didn’t resemble an England where enslaved children were sucked into machines. These mill girls (now seen as early feminists) even put out their own magazines, increasingly full of protest.
When competition arose elsewhere in the States, conditions here became hellish—lower pay and increased hours amid the din of crashing looms, in stifling rooms with windows nailed shut to keep the cotton from drying out—and major strikes as early as the 1830s. The mill girls were replaced with Greek, Italian, Polish, and French-Canadian immigrants, but the strikes continued. What eventually did Lowell in was radically cheaper competition that arose in the south, where the cotton was grown.
For much of the 20th century the city went downhill, but nearby biotech industries, as well as tourism, have saved it. As Bob Fish (a jazz guitarist who works in the computer industry nearby) put it, “What I love is how proud, global-minded, and artistic a place Lowell is. We have a huge folk music festival every summer when the city lets its hair down. That’s when you see why locals who never travel anywhere still feel worldly. If you’re living alongside a dozen other nationalities and languages, you don’t have to go anywhere to be cosmopolitan.”
You could stand, in fact, on a downtown corner in mid-afternoon and hear Khmer, Spanish, and Greek—today’s Lowell, with only 100,000 people, has fifty-seven ethnic communities. I saw this in the Latino what-not dollar shops, in the Italian grocery, in the Greek milkshake parlor. Schoolkids walking past, chatting in a heavy Massachusetts accent, were among the city’s 30,000 Cambodians, the second-largest such community in the country.
“And not only do they have what you’d expect,” Bob added, “like their own food stores, but they have their own lawyers and video stores and beauty parlors. So the Lowell immigrant community tradition is as vibrant as ever.”
Apart from Bette Davis, Ed McMahon, and Senator Paul Tsongas (much responsible for the federal millions that gave Lowell a new life), the city also produced the painter James McNeill Whistler. The house where Whistler first met his mother is a small museum with a revolving collection of his etchings and sketches and a large array of local seascapes. Other museums are devoted to quilts, textiles, and New England sports, but Lowell’s unity of focus made coming here feel like a frank dose of reality.
Jack Kerouac (1922-69), despite the deafening fame of On the Road, was foremost a novelist, and the Lowell of his upbringing recurs in his fiction. The Lowell he wrote about is architecturally everywhere, and still brings what locals call “Kerou-wackos” for an annual festival in his honor. (The city has wisely created a tiny memorial park, with excerpts from his books on stone slabs.) The Working People Museum, in a mill-girl boardinghouse, displays Kerouac’s portable Underwood typewriter, his backpack, and road gear from poncho to goggles to aspirin. “You’re the first person to ask to see it in ages,” said the woman who guided me to its glass case. “Funny thing. His typewriter’s the only obsolete item in there.”
One spot Kerouac often evoked is the Grotto, which should be seen by night. It has, I bet, the world’s only drive-through Stations of the Cross, its plaster statues alive under exotic yellow, blue, pink, and green spotlights, its rocky man-made grotto inset with a statue of the Virgin wearing a halo of blue neon.
It is all too easy to forget the industrial labor that enriched this country—seventy-hour work weeks in horrific conditions—but even a brief visit to Lowell is a sobering, illuminating reminder. And who knows? A century from now we may have our own version of Lowell—perhaps as distant, in every sense, as Silicon Valley.
I’ve always had trouble with New England mythologizing—the cookie-box history of tea overboard, revolutionary battles, moonlight rides. That frock-coat past usually seems as remote and romantic as a children’s storybook. Lowell, Massachusetts has another history entirely, of labor struggles amid the birth pangs of the industrial era. This was Jack Kerouac’s town, a riverside cluster of relentless textile mills “built in brick, primly towered, solid” that ate wave after wave of workers, prospered in the 19th century, and sank early in the 20th. Yet the city has recovered in the last twenty years, realizing its industrial role was something to be proud of, and facing its gritty labor history head-on.
Water helped make Lowell rich in the early 1800s. The original town was built on a crisscross of canals which—originally intended as a quicker route to the sea, and thence Boston—instead ended up harnessing vast water power.
Today’s Lowell didn’t at first strike me as particularly alluring, though I’ve never seen a city with so much preserved Americana in a compact space: luncheonettes with soda fountains straight out of my childhood, shoe-repair or optometrist shops that might as well have Eisenhower’s photo in the window. Then I began to notice how the downtown’s brick edifices have unexpectedly ornate flourishes, the detailed workmanship that comes from wealth building confidently in a boom time.
I didn’t have to walk far to find what had paid for it all: the long, red, many-windowed mills that straddle and overshadow the canals. Historic, industrial-era Lowell is a national park, and a park ranger named Alex Demas, in what was once the Boott Mill complex—now an extraordinary museum—taught me about a period I’d taken for granted.
Alex was in his fifties, a sturdy man with a gray beard and mustache, and a gentle sarcasm. He was also a natural explainer and performer. “I started as a countertenor in New York. I eventually became a bluegrass banjo picker, ended up in Boston’s coffeehouse scene, then moved to the Merrimack River Valley in 1974. I’ve been a ranger here since the park’s inception in ’78.” His performing life dovetailed nicely with his day job, since he could perform, say, a protest song composed by a Lowell “mill girl” in 1830 (I Am A Slave Girl) as part of a museum program. And he was a passionate explainer of that history.
According to Alex, “Lowell was the country’s first successful, planned industrial city.” In the early 19th century the American demand for British textiles was huge; one young Massachusetts gentleman managed a spying coup on England’s “dark satanic mills” and copied from memory their advanced machinery. He died before he saw Lowell (named for him) built as a factory metropolis by entrepreneurs who realized that its flowing canals could power thousands of looms.
The first workers were the so-called mill girls, age fifteen to thirty, off nearby New England farms, and as Alex pointed out, glad of the job. “They were away from their families, they were in an unimaginably big, clean city, they had hundreds of friends just like them, they were earning money. They would come work for a couple of years to earn their dowry, then go back to the farm and let their younger sister replace them.”
In 1826 Lowell had 2,500 inhabitants; by 1850 the number was up to 33,000. “The El Dorado on the Merrimack” seemed a bright vision of the country’s future, turning out two million yards of cloth each week in a fully integrated plan. Under one roof for the first time, raw cotton came in and eventually emerged as finished textiles—a brilliant, original American system. At first, Lowell appeared a model workers’ community, that didn’t resemble an England where enslaved children were sucked into machines. These mill girls (now seen as early feminists) even put out their own magazines, increasingly full of protest.
When competition arose elsewhere in the States, conditions here became hellish—lower pay and increased hours amid the din of crashing looms, in stifling rooms with windows nailed shut to keep the cotton from drying out—and major strikes as early as the 1830s. The mill girls were replaced with Greek, Italian, Polish, and French-Canadian immigrants, but the strikes continued. What eventually did Lowell in was radically cheaper competition that arose in the south, where the cotton was grown.
For much of the 20th century the city went downhill, but nearby biotech industries, as well as tourism, have saved it. As Bob Fish (a jazz guitarist who works in the computer industry nearby) put it, “What I love is how proud, global-minded, and artistic a place Lowell is. We have a huge folk music festival every summer when the city lets its hair down. That’s when you see why locals who never travel anywhere still feel worldly. If you’re living alongside a dozen other nationalities and languages, you don’t have to go anywhere to be cosmopolitan.”
You could stand, in fact, on a downtown corner in mid-afternoon and hear Khmer, Spanish, and Greek—today’s Lowell, with only 100,000 people, has fifty-seven ethnic communities. I saw this in the Latino what-not dollar shops, in the Italian grocery, in the Greek milkshake parlor. Schoolkids walking past, chatting in a heavy Massachusetts accent, were among the city’s 30,000 Cambodians, the second-largest such community in the country.
“And not only do they have what you’d expect,” Bob added, “like their own food stores, but they have their own lawyers and video stores and beauty parlors. So the Lowell immigrant community tradition is as vibrant as ever.”
Apart from Bette Davis, Ed McMahon, and Senator Paul Tsongas (much responsible for the federal millions that gave Lowell a new life), the city also produced the painter James McNeill Whistler. The house where Whistler first met his mother is a small museum with a revolving collection of his etchings and sketches and a large array of local seascapes. Other museums are devoted to quilts, textiles, and New England sports, but Lowell’s unity of focus made coming here feel like a frank dose of reality.
Jack Kerouac (1922-69), despite the deafening fame of On the Road, was foremost a novelist, and the Lowell of his upbringing recurs in his fiction. The Lowell he wrote about is architecturally everywhere, and still brings what locals call “Kerou-wackos” for an annual festival in his honor. (The city has wisely created a tiny memorial park, with excerpts from his books on stone slabs.) The Working People Museum, in a mill-girl boardinghouse, displays Kerouac’s portable Underwood typewriter, his backpack, and road gear from poncho to goggles to aspirin. “You’re the first person to ask to see it in ages,” said the woman who guided me to its glass case. “Funny thing. His typewriter’s the only obsolete item in there.”
One spot Kerouac often evoked is the Grotto, which should be seen by night. It has, I bet, the world’s only drive-through Stations of the Cross, its plaster statues alive under exotic yellow, blue, pink, and green spotlights, its rocky man-made grotto inset with a statue of the Virgin wearing a halo of blue neon.
It is all too easy to forget the industrial labor that enriched this country—seventy-hour work weeks in horrific conditions—but even a brief visit to Lowell is a sobering, illuminating reminder. And who knows? A century from now we may have our own version of Lowell—perhaps as distant, in every sense, as Silicon Valley.
Friday, September 15, 2000
The Golden Isles of Georgia
Written in 2000 for Islands magazine. This was my second collaboration with photographer Macduff Everton.
Back in the 1970s, my mother and I made regular pilgrimages to the Georgia coast during my spring vacations. From the port of Brunswick, we’d cross a causeway to an island that seemed to me, at age fifteen or twenty, a quietly funky heaven of sand, sea, spartina grass, and motley year-rounders. The idea of an island linked to the mainland seemed perfect: all the usual advantages, and few of the customary difficulties. It was easy to imagine coming back when I was older, maybe settling in for several months to write.
But I never did. My life took me to New York, and overseas for many years, then finally to New England. Yet fantasies have a way of coming up in casual conversation, and after I moved up north, I was always surprised at how few snowbirds, migrating annually, had heard of the barrier islands that hug virtually the entire 150 miles of Georgia coast. Recently I decided to find out if the decades had been kind to them.
Eight are large enough to be named on maps. Ossabaw, St. Catherines, and Blackbeard are state nature preserves, with only a few researchers and no visitors. Continuing south, Sapelo, Sea Island, St. Simons, Jekyll, and Cumberland were still names I at least recognized from years ago—though I knew I’d never visited all of them, and (even worse) couldn’t be sure which technicolor fragment of teenage memory belonged where.
Part of my beginnings as a writer were on those isles; my second novel, never published, was set along that coast. I had an acute memory of how the islands were a unique, unusual incarnation of the south—surrounded by salt marshes, with an otherworldly poetry all their own. So I flew to Savannah, drove south to Brunswick, and crossed the first bridge.
St. Simons was where my mother and I always stayed, the only island with a significant population (about 25,000) and plenty of motels. Here once again was the dense scent of pines I remembered, the same coastal breeze. The road through the island looked far more commercial than before—swank new malls and gated “communities” alongside the much more satisfying anarchy of the Georgia woods. I headed for the Village, the island’s compact hub, with its fishing pier, its clustered vacation shops, its lackadaisical bygone air, and its elegant 19th century lighthouse. I was glad to see that so little had changed; you couldn’t get a designer coffee, though you could find 1950s-style flip-flops.
No Butchering of Large Fish On Pier said the sign. Fat kids in swimsuits were leaping in, and a few regulars were busy with a spigot for cleaning fish on the wood-railed pier. To walk along it was still a promenade worth doing a few times each day; for my mother and me it had always rounded off a fish dinner. I saw now that for her, being English, this spot would’ve held faint echoes of a small-scale British seaside resort. This had never occurred to me before.
Here too was our changeless motel, the Queen’s Court, with its serene gardens around a modest pool, where I wrote a chunk of my first novel at age eighteen and solidified a lifelong work pattern (black pen, yellow legal pad) on instinct alone. I remembered scribbling in the drowsy heat, a few kids splashing away and paradoxically helping my concentration, nursing the vague sensation that there were many more books in me and wondering what they might be.
In a used bookstore a block away I fell into conversation about those old days with Bill Baxter, a hefty man who helped run the shop. He said, “You bet St. Simons has changed a lot in two decades. Now we’re busy year round.”
“I suppose the shopkeepers like that.”
“Well, some do. Personally, I don’t like all the money here now—lot of folks who work here have to live over in Brunswick, on the mainland. It’s hard to find a reasonable place to rent unless you’ve been on St. Simons a long time. And I wish they wouldn’t keep cutting trees down for all the new shopping centers. It makes me mad when they do that.”
I could only agree: it seemed a betrayal of those beloved Georgia woods.
I had one more pilgrimage to make. Just up the road, at Fort Frederica, I realized I’d forgotten how little there was to see of Georgia’s original military town, which held back and ultimately defeated a Spanish force moving out of Florida—a barracks tower, the odd house foundation, the stone remains of the fort’s magazine. But the site is superb, with a view across the marsh. A few cannon (range: one mile) make it evident why Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia in 1733, chose this spot for his settlement of 1500, which survived barely twenty years. Once the Spanish were gone, it had outlived its usefulness.
I was staying on Sea Island, smallest of the isles, linked to St. Simons by a bridge even I could throw a stone across. House by house, it has some of the most expensive residences in the country, and grew up around a classic hotel resort called the Cloister (1928), designed by the master architect of Florida’s grand villas, Addison Mizner. Unfortunately, too little of Mizner’s detailed design has been preserved in the original tawny stucco building, and the new parts of the resort bear no connection to his serene Italianate vision. The Cloister remains a honeymoon of choice among Southern families with money, and thrives off golf courses over on St. Simons, a faithful staff, and the aura of a private island. Although the beach is still legally public, it looked more awkward for interlopers like my mother and me to come enjoy it for the day.
Apart from St. Simons, most of these islands were privately owned by millionaires for much of the 20th century; their present undeveloped condition is the result. Sea Island is the only one still in private hands—a family called Jones, who also control much of the unbuilt land on St. Simons. On both isles local chat oscillates between blame on the Jones family for the developments taking place, gratitude for so much that hasn’t, or a grudging it-could-be-worse.
And there isn’t much to narrow Sea Island: the resort and a systematic avenue of houses, with brief streets leading away either to the marsh or the Atlantic beach. At high noon I went for a walk in stupefying June heat and, pouring sweat and swatting bugs, I ran into a gardener who set me straight on prices, since—the literary life being uncertain—I am always in the market for prime real estate.
“You want something on the beach? Five to ten million. You don’t have to be on the beach, you can get away with four million.”
I said I absolutely had to be on the beach, but perhaps I might rent for a while first.
“You’re looking at six, seven thousand a week. There’s so much money now that people are lined up to try to buy. And all these new houses going up.”
More new houses? It looks impossible to build more on Sea Island. I had memories of plenty of open space, but most empty lots have now been built on, right to the end of the island. People were paying a great deal to be part of a community whose appeal was based on a quaintness that was no longer the case; and I could count on my fingers how many of the new houses had any aesthetic to them.
One beautiful exception—at first I thought I was hallucinating—was the house of architect John Portman, on 26th Street by the beach. It is almost beyond belief in context, for amid the low ordinary houses rises a playful white concrete and glass fantasy ten times their size, partly hidden by an ivied wall, with a sculpted nude dancer just visible. It could be the modern art museum of some major city, with a gigantic white arbor, immense windows, squiggles and commas and stacked cubes, walkways and audacious white beams running across, a helipad on the roof and a living room that revolves.
A writer who’d had the right idea long before me was Eugene O’Neill, who built a house here with his wife, Carlotta, in 1931—the Casa Genotta. Though closed to the public, I could just see the house, apparently of woven brick, from the beach at 19th Street. O’Neill’s second floor study was designed to resemble a captain’s quarters at the stern of a ship, with tilted windows and a view of the beach. There he wrote Day Without End, a religious play, and Ah, Wilderness, his lightest, and tried out his version of my fantasy. Apparently the O’Neills were very reclusive: she only went out once a week, to pay the bills, and he rarely went out at all. Imagining the view from his study, this was easy to understand, since the sea would’ve filled the horizon above his typewriter.
An hour’s drive north, at the sleepy, well-preserved mainland port of Darien, I barely made a punctual ferry that runs thrice daily to Sapelo. As we crossed the calm waters of an immense salt marsh, my fellow passengers, all surrounded by boxes of food, made clear this was another world. Sapelo is the sole island with a predominantly black population, descendants of ex- slaves who have owned their own land, called Hog Hammock, since the Civil War. With only ninety residents total, the situation on Sapelo, otherwise owned mostly by the state and formerly by millionaires, is of Byzantine complexity.
The island is managed (using federal funds) by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which provides free water, road repairs, and a ferry pass at a nominal fee for Hog Hammock residents. The state doesn’t offer private docking facilities; they manage a reservations-only campground, but you can’t bring over a bicycle. Sapelo—twelve miles long, three to five miles wide, with seven miles of beaches—is less developed now than a hundred years ago.
This meant you could camp out, or stay overnight with a resident (say, at a guest house in Hog Hammock, like me) or else with the University of Georgia Marine Institute, whose research facility has been here since 1953 and which some locals consider part of the island, some not. Most visitors, ten thousand annually, come over by the day for a three-hour DNR tour: the mansion, a beach, the old lighthouse, and Hog Hammock, where a few residents sell their dolls, quilts, grapevine wreaths. and baskets. But the day-trippers are usually gone around lunchtime, so they get little idea of the island’s life.
Ceaser Banks, a grizzled gentleman of great warmth, met me at the dock. With his wife Nancy, he runs The Weekender guest house. In his van we rattled over the only road (which Sapelonians called the “autobahn”) to Hog Hammock—400-plus acres of neat houses, trailer homes, and planted fields among pines, palmetto, and live oak. “At this very moment,” he announced, “we have sixty-seven residents, two bars, and two churches that swap from week to week. Seventeen kids go to school on the mainland by morning ferry.”
“So what are you missing, Ceaser?”
“Well, we have no McDonald’s. And no crime.”
There are other limitations. Gas can be only bought for one hour on Tuesday, one hour on Friday. Grocery orders come over by ferry twice a week. The alternative, in the heart of Hog Hammock, is the BJ Confectionary, open daily. Inside, besides the shelves of staples, were framed pictures of FDR, a tv, sofas, family sports trophies, and a photo of B.J. with Jimmy Carter, who liked visiting Sapelo. The store is run by B.J.’s grandson, Tracy Alexander, a soft-spoken man in his forties, with gentle eyes and a tolerant smile.
I bought a couple of cold drinks and got Tracy to reminisce about his trucking days in California before coming back to Sapelo. I said, “It must seem pretty quiet here after living on the West Coast.”
He murmured genially, “Well, we’ve never had anybody sue anybody else. The biggest crime around here is gossip and slander.”
“That makes it unique.”
“Not really. You can look through America and find plenty of rural communities like this one. The Mayberries and the Hootervilles. What makes Sapelo special is water—the ordeal of water. The water we have to go across to get here or to get off here. It makes neighborliness different, it makes race relations different, because we don’t have a choice. When we know we’re all in this together, I don’t take advantage of you and you don’t take advantage of me.”
Another longtime resident, Cornelia Bailey—who has just published a Sapelo memoir, God, Doctor Buzzard, and the Bolito Man—told me, “A lot of times people come over to Hog Hammock expecting to see old folk speaking Gullah or Geechee. Once there were five communities; now there’s just this one. In 1974 there were three schools, now there’s no school. If we don’t make a decisive plan we’re in trouble.” She shook her head. “Success don’t always come in the form of a dollar sign. As children here we lived by the signs of nature; the old folks still do. I could tell the tides from how the marsh hens laughed. That’s my station in life—to remember these things.”
Late one Hog Hammock afternoon I went to visit Yvonne Grovner, who works days as a DNR guide—she’d shown me around the Reynolds mansion. Yvonne learned basket weaving eight years ago in a small class given by Allen Greene, the acknowledged local master whose baskets are in the Smithsonian. “Allen passed away a couple of years ago, at ninety-three,” Yvonne recalled. “He told me he started making baskets around 1918, having learned from his great- grandfather. From an African design and tradition. Now I have a grant from the Reynolds Foundation to teach a class here myself.” While we talked, Yvonne was making a “sweet grass” basket, using a sawtooth palmetto stem as the thread to hold the basket together, and a nail as the needle.
As day settled down with dogs barking, the blue-gray smoke from tree stumps being burned in a field rose over the road winding among the wooden houses and meticulous gardens and pine woods, the glow faded in an immense sky, and Hog Hammock at twilight became a mystical place, fully alive.
That night Ceaser promised to wake me at dawn for an early walk. “Say something to me in Geechee,” I asked him—like Gullah, a mix of English and African syntax and vocabulary, with various southernisms added.
He smiled broadly. “I’ll see you when day clean,” he said.
Much of the other half of the Sapelo story was contained in a single building. The Reynolds mansion turned out to be graceful and elegant; its lines are curved, and low, shaded by palms and live oaks. Originally built by the planter who owned Sapelo and kept a thousand slaves until the Civil War, it was revived in the 1920s by a man named Coffin, who also owned much of the island and received guests like Coolidge, Hoover, and Lindbergh before selling to R. J. Reynolds, the cigarette millionaire. In 1969 Reynolds’ widow sold the mansion, and (once again) most of Sapelo, this time to the state. It was no wonder Hog Hammock kept feeling like an island within an island.
Nowadays the Marine Institute appropriately occupies the out-buildings adjoining the mansion grounds, with resident ecologists, biologists, chemists, technicians, grad students, and interns. There I met with geologist Jon Garbisch, who made time to walk with me beside the marsh before meeting his wife and kids off the last ferry. I wondered aloud if many scientists stayed here long with their families and he grinned. “Some faculty have lived here for over twenty years. There’s plenty to study—close to 900 papers have been written about Sapelo in all the various sciences. The lab is the whole island.”
Standing at sunset looking over a shimmer of green spartina grass, the Marine Institute seemed a good life, assuming you got along well with your neighbors and your colleagues. I told Jon I’d read how Sapelo’s marsh was as pristine as a coastal marsh could be—four to five miles of spartina that was “hardly impacted.” It didn’t seem possible, I said; surely the mainland was too close.
“Not at all. The last major development in the area was Darien, as a timber port back in the 1880s. We get two extremely high tides here daily that wash out the entire marsh with fresh oxygen and new nutrients. The result is that things grow twice as fast as in the Carolinas. See, nothing is static here. Everything is changing, but everything is adapted to change.”
The next day I took a long walk on Nanny Goat, which Jon had called “as pristine a beach as we have on this coast.” It was a wide expanse, with a stiff breeze sending wisps of sand scurrying in jet-trails. There was mild surf, which I didn’t see on other islands, and a wind-agitated sea farther out; the horizon was dotted with shrimp boats with wings extended. But they kept their distance, and after an hour I decided it was as majestic and peaceful a beach as this country has to offer, with absolutely no one else on it. It was irrelevant that I’d never seen it as a child, since it wouldn’t have been any different.
I’d visited Jekyll back then, though I had no memory of it. The island is a mere few minutes’ ride over a marsh causeway from Brunswick, right near St. Simons; its beach, longer than the island itself, runs for ten miles, with little surf. What I recalled instead were those schoolmates in Macon, where I grew up, whose families had rented houses on Jekyll for the entire summer; thus I imagined it an exclusive place. In early photographs the millionaires pose here on horseback, with satisfied grins at “roughing it,” for a century ago Jekyll was a club, a private island owned by a few industrialists who bought it in 1886 from the original French planters. For six decades you didn’t get on or off the island without a pass, and guests needed the approval of a club committee.
Today it feels remarkably innocent, the houses set spaciously apart, no hotels taller than any tree and no sense of exploitation. I came expecting a stodgy nostalgia for a privileged yesteryear, but instead found a quiet island of no pretensions, an odd mix of the relaxed year-rounder, campers here to go fishing, and tourists enjoying the preserved honor-guard of mansions or biking on trails amid live oak, trumpet vine, jasmine and wisteria. Only eight miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, Jekyll is a state park: only 35% may ever be developed.
The epicenter of it all, a recently-restored hotel, was once the Jekyll Island Club—completed in 1887, with dining room, reading room, billiards room, ladies’ parlor, and card room, with a circular tower and wraparound porches. Nearby lots were planned so no “cottage” would be more than a quarter mile away. Jekyll had a three-month winter season; the mansions were mostly shingle style, built through the Twenties for Pulitzers, Vanderbilts, J.P. Morgan with his own indoor tennis courts and yacht. I particularly liked Mrs. Rockefeller’s house—not for sale, unfortunately—and her insistence on a dumb waiter in her bedroom, so servants could pull her up and down.
“It was a Who’s Who of the industrial world of the late 19th century,” June McCash said to me one afternoon on the restored hotel’s porch, where we sat in rocking chairs sipping lemonade. A medieval professor in Tennessee, since buying a home here fifteen years ago (though her intention was to find time to write in her field) McCash has authored several books of local history.
I told her how hard it was to imagine this place empty and abandoned, after so much money had gone into setting it up in the first place.
She shrugged. “Many of those affluent and powerful went through a difficult Depression. Jekyll Club membership kept falling, and the last original member died in ’38. Their kids found this a Victorian, musty place. People just wanted something more jet-set. So the club closed in ’42 and planned to reopen a year later, but a German sub was found in Brunswick harbor, and that was that. The war was a coup de grace.” In 1947 the state bought Jekyll and those mansions for $675,000; many had reverted to the club for non-payment of dues.
Now there are about a thousand residents, with plenty of part-timers from out-of-state who turn into Jekyll Islanders as soon as they open the shutters. I asked the maitre d’ at the hotel dining room, Joseph Ferrari, about them. A white-haired Italian gentleman with a courtly manner, a veteran of the Plaza in New York for nearly thirty years, he laughed. “The residents come sit around the pool like Roman senators, you know. They gossip and decide whom to like and whom to kill. The thumbs up or the thumbs down.”
Yet even on Memorial Day weekend Jekyll still felt uncrowded, and the beach was so long and wide there was no need for the joggers, shellers, kids, and honeymooners to avoid each other. It was all protected, and huge tracts were kept wild, yet you could buy the New York Times every morning. In the end Jekyll was the only island where my youthful fantasy still felt fully viable, where—with an adjusted income—I could actually imagine settling.
Cumberland is a third larger than Manhattan, roughly the same shape, but otherwise its antithesis: a nature island which mostly belongs to the nation. Barely in Georgia, it’s reached by ferry across a strait from north Florida. You can stay for the day, or hike to a campsite if you’re willing to lug everything you need. Or else, as I did, stay at an inn by turns lavish and rustic called Greyfield, built as a mansion by the Carnegie family at the turn of the century and run by descendants. In 1900, 90% of the island was in Carnegie hands; in 1972 the Park Service made 90% of Cumberland a “national seashore.”
Cumberland is the largest Georgia island, with the greatest diversity of plant and animal life. More than any other, it seems a conspiracy of nature to make up for the fact that man was here in force once; and much federal effort is being expended to help. The island has a furious profusion, an explosive sense of dynamic life growing and braiding everywhere—from feral horses wandering a beach, to the armadillo patiently going around a few unexpected humans, to squadrons of butterflies flicking through a mimosa tree at dusk.
The couple I met on the porch at the Greyfield Inn were rewarding themselves after camping out a few miles away. Kelly, a law student, and her husband Andy, a chemical engineer, had been under siege by mosquitos for five days, and they were glad to be at this turn-of-the-century house of informal grandeur on a large scale, with its wood-paneled libraries, a generous porch with rocking chairs, the first-rate dining room. They’d enjoyed both extremes of the island, and as Kelly said, “Once we realized it was all right, we’d hike from our campsite and spend every afternoon reading in a swing on the porch of Plum Orchard, this abandoned old Carnegie mansion. Every now and then someone would stop by to look around, stare at us, then move on.”
One morning with Fred Whitehead, a former park ranger now with Greyfield, I raced in a Land Rover down the 17½-mile beach on the Atlantic side, with low grassy dunes on our left and a few shrimp boats to sea on our right. At the water’s edge were pelicans and smaller royal terns assembled around them, a support system mildly watching for danger. Many animals here—like the horses that roam the island—are unexpectedly tame, and perceive people not as a threat but rather a petty annoyance to slowly walk away from.
This is recent history only, for after the usual pattern of Indian tribes, Spanish missionaries, and British conquest, under slave labor the island’s vast forests of live oak had been entirely, surgically pillaged for ships’ frames—timbers for the USS Constitution came from Cumberland.
Miles down the beach, turning inland, we reached Halfmoon Bluff, a settlement bought after the Civil War by several families of ex-slaves. Now only a few ramshackle houses, its core is the African Baptist Church—worn white planks with painted-over windows to keep it cool against the heat ticking away. It was no longer used, though J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn had married here. I pushed open the church door; inside were only a threadbare rug, a broom stood upside-down in a corner, and a small cross of rough branches.
Farther on we came to Plum Orchard, a flaking, rotting white colossus framed by royal palms and shut tight. I peered through grimy windows at a tiled swimming pool, fine floors, dark furniture. Later that day I visited its predecessor, Dungeness, at the other end of the island—a mansion that once included forty out-buildings, served by a staff of 300. Having burned down in the ’50s, Dungeness is an overgrown stone ruin, with feral horses grazing the circular drive. On Cumberland it felt unbelievable, at a remove of a century, that millionaires had once owned these islands and built sumptuous mansions against their wildness. Nature, on this hot June day, looked highly efficient.
It struck me repeatedly, in my two weeks on Georgia’s isles, how very few places in the world you can go back to a quarter-century later and not feel dislocated by, much less cheated. By and large these islands were actually even improving, and in a curious way, the ones I’d never visited before began to feel as familiar as the ones I’d thought about all these years. I hadn’t realized their natural beauty had left such a strong imprint on me; I’d have said it was my sense of how people lived here. Now I realized I liked them better empty.
It was soothing to bike along a road of sand and crushed oyster shells beneath the arcade of live oaks that runs the length of Cumberland, to take a path through dense woods whiskered with Spanish moss and engulfed by the fierce humming of cicadas in the heat, to see the path eventually open onto mile after mile of beach. I’d remembered right for all these years; I’d remember again.
But I never did. My life took me to New York, and overseas for many years, then finally to New England. Yet fantasies have a way of coming up in casual conversation, and after I moved up north, I was always surprised at how few snowbirds, migrating annually, had heard of the barrier islands that hug virtually the entire 150 miles of Georgia coast. Recently I decided to find out if the decades had been kind to them.
Eight are large enough to be named on maps. Ossabaw, St. Catherines, and Blackbeard are state nature preserves, with only a few researchers and no visitors. Continuing south, Sapelo, Sea Island, St. Simons, Jekyll, and Cumberland were still names I at least recognized from years ago—though I knew I’d never visited all of them, and (even worse) couldn’t be sure which technicolor fragment of teenage memory belonged where.
Part of my beginnings as a writer were on those isles; my second novel, never published, was set along that coast. I had an acute memory of how the islands were a unique, unusual incarnation of the south—surrounded by salt marshes, with an otherworldly poetry all their own. So I flew to Savannah, drove south to Brunswick, and crossed the first bridge.
St. Simons was where my mother and I always stayed, the only island with a significant population (about 25,000) and plenty of motels. Here once again was the dense scent of pines I remembered, the same coastal breeze. The road through the island looked far more commercial than before—swank new malls and gated “communities” alongside the much more satisfying anarchy of the Georgia woods. I headed for the Village, the island’s compact hub, with its fishing pier, its clustered vacation shops, its lackadaisical bygone air, and its elegant 19th century lighthouse. I was glad to see that so little had changed; you couldn’t get a designer coffee, though you could find 1950s-style flip-flops.
No Butchering of Large Fish On Pier said the sign. Fat kids in swimsuits were leaping in, and a few regulars were busy with a spigot for cleaning fish on the wood-railed pier. To walk along it was still a promenade worth doing a few times each day; for my mother and me it had always rounded off a fish dinner. I saw now that for her, being English, this spot would’ve held faint echoes of a small-scale British seaside resort. This had never occurred to me before.
Here too was our changeless motel, the Queen’s Court, with its serene gardens around a modest pool, where I wrote a chunk of my first novel at age eighteen and solidified a lifelong work pattern (black pen, yellow legal pad) on instinct alone. I remembered scribbling in the drowsy heat, a few kids splashing away and paradoxically helping my concentration, nursing the vague sensation that there were many more books in me and wondering what they might be.
In a used bookstore a block away I fell into conversation about those old days with Bill Baxter, a hefty man who helped run the shop. He said, “You bet St. Simons has changed a lot in two decades. Now we’re busy year round.”
“I suppose the shopkeepers like that.”
“Well, some do. Personally, I don’t like all the money here now—lot of folks who work here have to live over in Brunswick, on the mainland. It’s hard to find a reasonable place to rent unless you’ve been on St. Simons a long time. And I wish they wouldn’t keep cutting trees down for all the new shopping centers. It makes me mad when they do that.”
I could only agree: it seemed a betrayal of those beloved Georgia woods.
I had one more pilgrimage to make. Just up the road, at Fort Frederica, I realized I’d forgotten how little there was to see of Georgia’s original military town, which held back and ultimately defeated a Spanish force moving out of Florida—a barracks tower, the odd house foundation, the stone remains of the fort’s magazine. But the site is superb, with a view across the marsh. A few cannon (range: one mile) make it evident why Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia in 1733, chose this spot for his settlement of 1500, which survived barely twenty years. Once the Spanish were gone, it had outlived its usefulness.
I was staying on Sea Island, smallest of the isles, linked to St. Simons by a bridge even I could throw a stone across. House by house, it has some of the most expensive residences in the country, and grew up around a classic hotel resort called the Cloister (1928), designed by the master architect of Florida’s grand villas, Addison Mizner. Unfortunately, too little of Mizner’s detailed design has been preserved in the original tawny stucco building, and the new parts of the resort bear no connection to his serene Italianate vision. The Cloister remains a honeymoon of choice among Southern families with money, and thrives off golf courses over on St. Simons, a faithful staff, and the aura of a private island. Although the beach is still legally public, it looked more awkward for interlopers like my mother and me to come enjoy it for the day.
Apart from St. Simons, most of these islands were privately owned by millionaires for much of the 20th century; their present undeveloped condition is the result. Sea Island is the only one still in private hands—a family called Jones, who also control much of the unbuilt land on St. Simons. On both isles local chat oscillates between blame on the Jones family for the developments taking place, gratitude for so much that hasn’t, or a grudging it-could-be-worse.
And there isn’t much to narrow Sea Island: the resort and a systematic avenue of houses, with brief streets leading away either to the marsh or the Atlantic beach. At high noon I went for a walk in stupefying June heat and, pouring sweat and swatting bugs, I ran into a gardener who set me straight on prices, since—the literary life being uncertain—I am always in the market for prime real estate.
“You want something on the beach? Five to ten million. You don’t have to be on the beach, you can get away with four million.”
I said I absolutely had to be on the beach, but perhaps I might rent for a while first.
“You’re looking at six, seven thousand a week. There’s so much money now that people are lined up to try to buy. And all these new houses going up.”
More new houses? It looks impossible to build more on Sea Island. I had memories of plenty of open space, but most empty lots have now been built on, right to the end of the island. People were paying a great deal to be part of a community whose appeal was based on a quaintness that was no longer the case; and I could count on my fingers how many of the new houses had any aesthetic to them.
One beautiful exception—at first I thought I was hallucinating—was the house of architect John Portman, on 26th Street by the beach. It is almost beyond belief in context, for amid the low ordinary houses rises a playful white concrete and glass fantasy ten times their size, partly hidden by an ivied wall, with a sculpted nude dancer just visible. It could be the modern art museum of some major city, with a gigantic white arbor, immense windows, squiggles and commas and stacked cubes, walkways and audacious white beams running across, a helipad on the roof and a living room that revolves.
A writer who’d had the right idea long before me was Eugene O’Neill, who built a house here with his wife, Carlotta, in 1931—the Casa Genotta. Though closed to the public, I could just see the house, apparently of woven brick, from the beach at 19th Street. O’Neill’s second floor study was designed to resemble a captain’s quarters at the stern of a ship, with tilted windows and a view of the beach. There he wrote Day Without End, a religious play, and Ah, Wilderness, his lightest, and tried out his version of my fantasy. Apparently the O’Neills were very reclusive: she only went out once a week, to pay the bills, and he rarely went out at all. Imagining the view from his study, this was easy to understand, since the sea would’ve filled the horizon above his typewriter.
An hour’s drive north, at the sleepy, well-preserved mainland port of Darien, I barely made a punctual ferry that runs thrice daily to Sapelo. As we crossed the calm waters of an immense salt marsh, my fellow passengers, all surrounded by boxes of food, made clear this was another world. Sapelo is the sole island with a predominantly black population, descendants of ex- slaves who have owned their own land, called Hog Hammock, since the Civil War. With only ninety residents total, the situation on Sapelo, otherwise owned mostly by the state and formerly by millionaires, is of Byzantine complexity.
The island is managed (using federal funds) by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which provides free water, road repairs, and a ferry pass at a nominal fee for Hog Hammock residents. The state doesn’t offer private docking facilities; they manage a reservations-only campground, but you can’t bring over a bicycle. Sapelo—twelve miles long, three to five miles wide, with seven miles of beaches—is less developed now than a hundred years ago.
This meant you could camp out, or stay overnight with a resident (say, at a guest house in Hog Hammock, like me) or else with the University of Georgia Marine Institute, whose research facility has been here since 1953 and which some locals consider part of the island, some not. Most visitors, ten thousand annually, come over by the day for a three-hour DNR tour: the mansion, a beach, the old lighthouse, and Hog Hammock, where a few residents sell their dolls, quilts, grapevine wreaths. and baskets. But the day-trippers are usually gone around lunchtime, so they get little idea of the island’s life.
Ceaser Banks, a grizzled gentleman of great warmth, met me at the dock. With his wife Nancy, he runs The Weekender guest house. In his van we rattled over the only road (which Sapelonians called the “autobahn”) to Hog Hammock—400-plus acres of neat houses, trailer homes, and planted fields among pines, palmetto, and live oak. “At this very moment,” he announced, “we have sixty-seven residents, two bars, and two churches that swap from week to week. Seventeen kids go to school on the mainland by morning ferry.”
“So what are you missing, Ceaser?”
“Well, we have no McDonald’s. And no crime.”
There are other limitations. Gas can be only bought for one hour on Tuesday, one hour on Friday. Grocery orders come over by ferry twice a week. The alternative, in the heart of Hog Hammock, is the BJ Confectionary, open daily. Inside, besides the shelves of staples, were framed pictures of FDR, a tv, sofas, family sports trophies, and a photo of B.J. with Jimmy Carter, who liked visiting Sapelo. The store is run by B.J.’s grandson, Tracy Alexander, a soft-spoken man in his forties, with gentle eyes and a tolerant smile.
I bought a couple of cold drinks and got Tracy to reminisce about his trucking days in California before coming back to Sapelo. I said, “It must seem pretty quiet here after living on the West Coast.”
He murmured genially, “Well, we’ve never had anybody sue anybody else. The biggest crime around here is gossip and slander.”
“That makes it unique.”
“Not really. You can look through America and find plenty of rural communities like this one. The Mayberries and the Hootervilles. What makes Sapelo special is water—the ordeal of water. The water we have to go across to get here or to get off here. It makes neighborliness different, it makes race relations different, because we don’t have a choice. When we know we’re all in this together, I don’t take advantage of you and you don’t take advantage of me.”
Another longtime resident, Cornelia Bailey—who has just published a Sapelo memoir, God, Doctor Buzzard, and the Bolito Man—told me, “A lot of times people come over to Hog Hammock expecting to see old folk speaking Gullah or Geechee. Once there were five communities; now there’s just this one. In 1974 there were three schools, now there’s no school. If we don’t make a decisive plan we’re in trouble.” She shook her head. “Success don’t always come in the form of a dollar sign. As children here we lived by the signs of nature; the old folks still do. I could tell the tides from how the marsh hens laughed. That’s my station in life—to remember these things.”
Late one Hog Hammock afternoon I went to visit Yvonne Grovner, who works days as a DNR guide—she’d shown me around the Reynolds mansion. Yvonne learned basket weaving eight years ago in a small class given by Allen Greene, the acknowledged local master whose baskets are in the Smithsonian. “Allen passed away a couple of years ago, at ninety-three,” Yvonne recalled. “He told me he started making baskets around 1918, having learned from his great- grandfather. From an African design and tradition. Now I have a grant from the Reynolds Foundation to teach a class here myself.” While we talked, Yvonne was making a “sweet grass” basket, using a sawtooth palmetto stem as the thread to hold the basket together, and a nail as the needle.
As day settled down with dogs barking, the blue-gray smoke from tree stumps being burned in a field rose over the road winding among the wooden houses and meticulous gardens and pine woods, the glow faded in an immense sky, and Hog Hammock at twilight became a mystical place, fully alive.
That night Ceaser promised to wake me at dawn for an early walk. “Say something to me in Geechee,” I asked him—like Gullah, a mix of English and African syntax and vocabulary, with various southernisms added.
He smiled broadly. “I’ll see you when day clean,” he said.
Much of the other half of the Sapelo story was contained in a single building. The Reynolds mansion turned out to be graceful and elegant; its lines are curved, and low, shaded by palms and live oaks. Originally built by the planter who owned Sapelo and kept a thousand slaves until the Civil War, it was revived in the 1920s by a man named Coffin, who also owned much of the island and received guests like Coolidge, Hoover, and Lindbergh before selling to R. J. Reynolds, the cigarette millionaire. In 1969 Reynolds’ widow sold the mansion, and (once again) most of Sapelo, this time to the state. It was no wonder Hog Hammock kept feeling like an island within an island.
Nowadays the Marine Institute appropriately occupies the out-buildings adjoining the mansion grounds, with resident ecologists, biologists, chemists, technicians, grad students, and interns. There I met with geologist Jon Garbisch, who made time to walk with me beside the marsh before meeting his wife and kids off the last ferry. I wondered aloud if many scientists stayed here long with their families and he grinned. “Some faculty have lived here for over twenty years. There’s plenty to study—close to 900 papers have been written about Sapelo in all the various sciences. The lab is the whole island.”
Standing at sunset looking over a shimmer of green spartina grass, the Marine Institute seemed a good life, assuming you got along well with your neighbors and your colleagues. I told Jon I’d read how Sapelo’s marsh was as pristine as a coastal marsh could be—four to five miles of spartina that was “hardly impacted.” It didn’t seem possible, I said; surely the mainland was too close.
“Not at all. The last major development in the area was Darien, as a timber port back in the 1880s. We get two extremely high tides here daily that wash out the entire marsh with fresh oxygen and new nutrients. The result is that things grow twice as fast as in the Carolinas. See, nothing is static here. Everything is changing, but everything is adapted to change.”
The next day I took a long walk on Nanny Goat, which Jon had called “as pristine a beach as we have on this coast.” It was a wide expanse, with a stiff breeze sending wisps of sand scurrying in jet-trails. There was mild surf, which I didn’t see on other islands, and a wind-agitated sea farther out; the horizon was dotted with shrimp boats with wings extended. But they kept their distance, and after an hour I decided it was as majestic and peaceful a beach as this country has to offer, with absolutely no one else on it. It was irrelevant that I’d never seen it as a child, since it wouldn’t have been any different.
I’d visited Jekyll back then, though I had no memory of it. The island is a mere few minutes’ ride over a marsh causeway from Brunswick, right near St. Simons; its beach, longer than the island itself, runs for ten miles, with little surf. What I recalled instead were those schoolmates in Macon, where I grew up, whose families had rented houses on Jekyll for the entire summer; thus I imagined it an exclusive place. In early photographs the millionaires pose here on horseback, with satisfied grins at “roughing it,” for a century ago Jekyll was a club, a private island owned by a few industrialists who bought it in 1886 from the original French planters. For six decades you didn’t get on or off the island without a pass, and guests needed the approval of a club committee.
Today it feels remarkably innocent, the houses set spaciously apart, no hotels taller than any tree and no sense of exploitation. I came expecting a stodgy nostalgia for a privileged yesteryear, but instead found a quiet island of no pretensions, an odd mix of the relaxed year-rounder, campers here to go fishing, and tourists enjoying the preserved honor-guard of mansions or biking on trails amid live oak, trumpet vine, jasmine and wisteria. Only eight miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, Jekyll is a state park: only 35% may ever be developed.
The epicenter of it all, a recently-restored hotel, was once the Jekyll Island Club—completed in 1887, with dining room, reading room, billiards room, ladies’ parlor, and card room, with a circular tower and wraparound porches. Nearby lots were planned so no “cottage” would be more than a quarter mile away. Jekyll had a three-month winter season; the mansions were mostly shingle style, built through the Twenties for Pulitzers, Vanderbilts, J.P. Morgan with his own indoor tennis courts and yacht. I particularly liked Mrs. Rockefeller’s house—not for sale, unfortunately—and her insistence on a dumb waiter in her bedroom, so servants could pull her up and down.
“It was a Who’s Who of the industrial world of the late 19th century,” June McCash said to me one afternoon on the restored hotel’s porch, where we sat in rocking chairs sipping lemonade. A medieval professor in Tennessee, since buying a home here fifteen years ago (though her intention was to find time to write in her field) McCash has authored several books of local history.
I told her how hard it was to imagine this place empty and abandoned, after so much money had gone into setting it up in the first place.
She shrugged. “Many of those affluent and powerful went through a difficult Depression. Jekyll Club membership kept falling, and the last original member died in ’38. Their kids found this a Victorian, musty place. People just wanted something more jet-set. So the club closed in ’42 and planned to reopen a year later, but a German sub was found in Brunswick harbor, and that was that. The war was a coup de grace.” In 1947 the state bought Jekyll and those mansions for $675,000; many had reverted to the club for non-payment of dues.
Now there are about a thousand residents, with plenty of part-timers from out-of-state who turn into Jekyll Islanders as soon as they open the shutters. I asked the maitre d’ at the hotel dining room, Joseph Ferrari, about them. A white-haired Italian gentleman with a courtly manner, a veteran of the Plaza in New York for nearly thirty years, he laughed. “The residents come sit around the pool like Roman senators, you know. They gossip and decide whom to like and whom to kill. The thumbs up or the thumbs down.”
Yet even on Memorial Day weekend Jekyll still felt uncrowded, and the beach was so long and wide there was no need for the joggers, shellers, kids, and honeymooners to avoid each other. It was all protected, and huge tracts were kept wild, yet you could buy the New York Times every morning. In the end Jekyll was the only island where my youthful fantasy still felt fully viable, where—with an adjusted income—I could actually imagine settling.
Cumberland is a third larger than Manhattan, roughly the same shape, but otherwise its antithesis: a nature island which mostly belongs to the nation. Barely in Georgia, it’s reached by ferry across a strait from north Florida. You can stay for the day, or hike to a campsite if you’re willing to lug everything you need. Or else, as I did, stay at an inn by turns lavish and rustic called Greyfield, built as a mansion by the Carnegie family at the turn of the century and run by descendants. In 1900, 90% of the island was in Carnegie hands; in 1972 the Park Service made 90% of Cumberland a “national seashore.”
Cumberland is the largest Georgia island, with the greatest diversity of plant and animal life. More than any other, it seems a conspiracy of nature to make up for the fact that man was here in force once; and much federal effort is being expended to help. The island has a furious profusion, an explosive sense of dynamic life growing and braiding everywhere—from feral horses wandering a beach, to the armadillo patiently going around a few unexpected humans, to squadrons of butterflies flicking through a mimosa tree at dusk.
The couple I met on the porch at the Greyfield Inn were rewarding themselves after camping out a few miles away. Kelly, a law student, and her husband Andy, a chemical engineer, had been under siege by mosquitos for five days, and they were glad to be at this turn-of-the-century house of informal grandeur on a large scale, with its wood-paneled libraries, a generous porch with rocking chairs, the first-rate dining room. They’d enjoyed both extremes of the island, and as Kelly said, “Once we realized it was all right, we’d hike from our campsite and spend every afternoon reading in a swing on the porch of Plum Orchard, this abandoned old Carnegie mansion. Every now and then someone would stop by to look around, stare at us, then move on.”
One morning with Fred Whitehead, a former park ranger now with Greyfield, I raced in a Land Rover down the 17½-mile beach on the Atlantic side, with low grassy dunes on our left and a few shrimp boats to sea on our right. At the water’s edge were pelicans and smaller royal terns assembled around them, a support system mildly watching for danger. Many animals here—like the horses that roam the island—are unexpectedly tame, and perceive people not as a threat but rather a petty annoyance to slowly walk away from.
This is recent history only, for after the usual pattern of Indian tribes, Spanish missionaries, and British conquest, under slave labor the island’s vast forests of live oak had been entirely, surgically pillaged for ships’ frames—timbers for the USS Constitution came from Cumberland.
Miles down the beach, turning inland, we reached Halfmoon Bluff, a settlement bought after the Civil War by several families of ex-slaves. Now only a few ramshackle houses, its core is the African Baptist Church—worn white planks with painted-over windows to keep it cool against the heat ticking away. It was no longer used, though J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn had married here. I pushed open the church door; inside were only a threadbare rug, a broom stood upside-down in a corner, and a small cross of rough branches.
Farther on we came to Plum Orchard, a flaking, rotting white colossus framed by royal palms and shut tight. I peered through grimy windows at a tiled swimming pool, fine floors, dark furniture. Later that day I visited its predecessor, Dungeness, at the other end of the island—a mansion that once included forty out-buildings, served by a staff of 300. Having burned down in the ’50s, Dungeness is an overgrown stone ruin, with feral horses grazing the circular drive. On Cumberland it felt unbelievable, at a remove of a century, that millionaires had once owned these islands and built sumptuous mansions against their wildness. Nature, on this hot June day, looked highly efficient.
It struck me repeatedly, in my two weeks on Georgia’s isles, how very few places in the world you can go back to a quarter-century later and not feel dislocated by, much less cheated. By and large these islands were actually even improving, and in a curious way, the ones I’d never visited before began to feel as familiar as the ones I’d thought about all these years. I hadn’t realized their natural beauty had left such a strong imprint on me; I’d have said it was my sense of how people lived here. Now I realized I liked them better empty.
It was soothing to bike along a road of sand and crushed oyster shells beneath the arcade of live oaks that runs the length of Cumberland, to take a path through dense woods whiskered with Spanish moss and engulfed by the fierce humming of cicadas in the heat, to see the path eventually open onto mile after mile of beach. I’d remembered right for all these years; I’d remember again.
Sunday, March 5, 2000
Antigua & Chichicastenango
Written in 2000 for the New York Times Magazine. This was my last collaboration with photographer Macduff Everton.
So much of travel is an experience of time. We rely on certain places to give us a portrait of the past, and on our imaginations to summon up what’s missing and shut out what doesn’t belong. This is why a Venice is rare: a place seemingly so well-preserved, so complete, that we can enjoy the illusion of walking around in another century.
And why, for a decade, I’d wanted to go back to Antigua, the colonial city rimmed by volcanos in Guatemala’s highlands. Once one of three Spanish capitals of the New World, Antigua was so repeatedly shattered by earthquakes that during the late 18th century it got evacuated and abandoned by government edict. Throughout the last century it has crawled back to life. Many ruins were repaired and rebuilt; writers like Aldous Huxley, visiting before World War II on the heels of a small expatriate community, recounted in impassioned tones (“one of the most romantic cities in the world”) its baroque splendor and half-devastated beauty.
During Guatemala’s recently ended 36-year civil war, the most brutal in the hemisphere, Antigua retained a magnificence and relative calm that still attracted visitors. Rather like a Guatemalan Krakow, Antigua held out as the heart of the country’s intellectual and cultural life, with plenty of museums, concerts, galleries, bookstores, and language schools. (It’s also within easy reach of Chichicastenango, the highlands town with a huge, age-old biweekly Mayan market.) I visited in 1990 for a few days and, like many foreigners, considered staying for months to rent a room inexpensively and study Spanish. But I moved on.
Now, having recently returned, I can think of no other city, not even Venice, where the architectural past is so enveloping and the present so easily held at bay. Antigua was as graceful as I remembered: a stately, walkable Spanish dream of lavish 18th century houses—block after dignified block of red or yellow, gray or green or blue stucco walls like rinds of seared fruit, with modest balconies and formal white moldings and tiled roofs. As if confirming the propriety of the secluded life within, their wooden doors are massive, bigger than horse-carriages, with knockers shaped like lions’ heads, pointed shields, arcing fish, or hands. Cars are forced to roll slowly along the uneven, immaculate cobblestoned streets, and no billboards or shop signs are allowed. One day in Antigua made me realize how much a modern fatigue that we take for granted is simply visual overload.
At the end of every street rose the slopes of volcanos, now plumed in mists, now glittering green in broad sunlight, looming like a false threat when for centuries the true danger has relentlessly come from below—from the uncertain, tremor-prone ground. It could be an allegory of Guatemala’s tragic politics, that the very earth might swallow up anyone’s life without warning.
But that danger seemed in the past. As a French travel agent who has lived in Antigua for over a decade pointed out to me, there’s now even a Guatemalan middle class. “And for people in the capital, Antigua has become the chic weekend spot. It’s driven the house rentals crazy. To buy a large old house is now a million dollars, because there’s nowhere like Antigua, and it’s only a square mile. Then after you buy the house it’s impossible to change it. You want to put a new doorway in an old wall? Forget it.”
As Friday afternoon waned, I sat in the Plaza Mayorbeneath purple jacaranda trees and watched the gentle promenade of the town, infinitely more relaxed than on my first visit. A band of brass, clarinets, and drums took their time between numbers; later they were replaced by a marimba orchestra who kept fizzing well after dark. Indians (the women in striped dresses and baggy blouses) stood in line outside the banks, whose tellers must be among the most sluggish in the world.
Guatemalans are a beautiful people—the Mayans more than the ladinos of primarily Spanish blood. Built low to the ground, they trot along at top speed with no effort, often with a pot or a load of blankets balanced impossibly on their heads, walking faster than everyone else, awkward in their posture but with stolid purpose. Their faces are open, with much inward delight and the struggle well masked. It seemed evident that the two peoples have always moved at two different tempi.
Everyone met on equal footing in Antigua’s hub, that plaza with its columned arcades, cathedral, cafes, and municipal nerve center. In recent years all the street lights have become 19th century-style lampposts, faithfully copied, like the lanterns hung from hotels, restaurants, and private homes. The result, as night fell, was that the shadows belonged to another age; the lamps came alive, as if upon a classic novel into which modern people and their ghostlike motorcars trespassed.
I saw the original lamps in the Colonial Museum, right on the square, along with a collection of cannons, pistols, and the busty stone mermaids lopped off the central fountain in the last century and later replaced. There were also crossbows, drums, rifles, spears, and arrows—pride in violence, and pride in the history of Guatemala (independent since 1821, over a dozen revolutions in the 20th century alone).
Next door a Museum of the Book contained an early edition of Don Quixote and volumes made here on the first printing press in the New World (1660), whose replica resembles a fiendish torture device. Many were treatises or grammars of indigenous languages, like the Maya, whose books the Spanish conquistadores had systematically destroyed. (To paraphrase Huxley: I can appreciate irony on my own, I do not need to have it underlined for me.)
Beyond the printed story there was anecdote. Many families have been here for many generations, and tales from before the 1773 earthquake and Antigua’s abandonment still circulate.
“Oh, there are a lot of stories,” an amateur historian named Hector told me. “Centuries ago there was a count in Antigua. Very important, always coming and going, because back in those days Guatemala wasn’t what it is today, no sir, it went from Chiapas in Mexico all the way through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Anyway, the count had a wife of considerable beauty. And whenever he was away he left her in the care of a servant—not another woman, but a butler. Eventually, you know, there was an understanding between the lady of the house and the butler. One day the count came back from his adventures and surprised them in the middle of, well, their own adventures. So the count got his men to open one wall as if for a cupboard, and he had the butler walled in. Alive.” He paused to savor this solution. “This was in a house right on the square, that’s now the Cafe Condesa, in the back. We always used to hear the story, just like many ghost stories Antigua is full of. Very dubious history, of course. So some of us were surprised a few years ago when the owners were doing repairs on the cafe. They had to open up a wall, and what did they find? A skeleton, my friend, buried in the wall. Standing up.”
The 18th century Antigua that survives is on a smaller scale than the 16th century original, for the early massive earthquakes made clear that those grand, Madrid structures were untenable. A typical story was the Church of El Merced, my favorite—a gigantic yellow wedding cake decorated in white icing, with children playing soccer among tortilla-women on its square. Its history summarizes Antigua. Construction begun in 1548; ruined by a huge earthquake in 1717. After years of restoration, another massive quake in 1773. Then centuries of neglect. Now mostly rebuilt, in the still-shattered arcade of its convent stands the biggest fountain in Central America—nude angels containing the waters—with bougainvillaea grown cunningly into the broken walls above.
Those earthquakes had never halted the appeal of the many-domed Church of San Francisco, one of the largest in Antigua, similarly destroyed and rebuilt but with one chapel which never closed. It is devoted to a beatified 17th century Franciscan monk named Pedro, buried within awaiting sainthood, who still attracts pilgrims praying for his aid. On display are his tattered clothes, the skull he used “for meditating on death,” and a pile of wooden crutches no longer needed by those “who received favors.”
These days most foreigners came to stay for weeks on end, studying Spanish; Antigua was full of young Europeans getting, say, thirty hours of private language studies a week for around sixty bucks. Some were from the USA, but unfortunately a lot of visitors from the States were still fighting a war.
This was for the religious loyalties of the Guatemalans, who have (depending on their background) a vast array of surviving Indian beliefs and also their own peculiar version of Catholicism, which incorporates an elaborate set of Mayan images. You’d think the centuries-old confluence of these two rivers would be enough, but a relentless North American stream of evangelists and “bridge-builders” from the Christian right were determined to divert and convert wherever possible. As on my last visit, I kept running into hordes of these self-satisfied do-gooders in sensible shoes, wielding their pamphlets and maps—a United Fruit Company of the soul. In the phone book for this part of Guatemala alone I counted six columns of such organizations; the result was a sign you might see in Antigua windows, saying in Spanish:
WE DO NOT ACCEPT HOUSE CALLS AND PROPAGANDA
One expatriate I could admire left his house open to the public. This was the Casa Popenoe, dating from 1632, the result of a love affair with Guatemala by an agronomist, Wilson Popenoe, and his wife Dorothy, an archaeologist who authored the first guidebook to Antigua and died young. (Their daughters occupy the house.) Louis Adamic wrote a happy 1937 memoir of an extended sojourn there that details how the house, one of the oldest in Antigua, was carefully restored by the Popenoes after they bought it as a ruin in 1929.
It is built typically around an inner patio whose calm garden is ruled by a great tree and bowl-like fountain and linked to smaller courtyards, their white walls lined with a superb collection of old bowls and tiles. The austere bedrooms, the library and salons, are full of colonial portraits and grave carved furniture. I clambered up spiral stairs to Popenoe’s study, a remnant of the colonial-era mail service—formerly a carrier-pigeon coop, with 115 bird nooks. Then onto the roof, with an all-embracing view of Antigua and its brooding volcanos swathed in mists and green forest. No wonder Adamic had felt he was in a writer’s heaven.
Chichicastenango is a highlands town of 5,000, clinging to its hills a couple of hours’ drive northwest of Antigua. I went, like so many foreigners, for its monumental Thursday and Sunday market, which takes over the small main square between two churches and becomes a dense metropolis of stalls shaded by plastic tarps on rough wood poles. The market is sometimes sniffily described as touristic, but this is a peripheral view, for only the outer stalls are for foreigners—weavings, statues, pottery, and masks. (The specialty of each strolling Mayan girl was tiny prayer dolls for children to tell their worries to, crowded into a box the size of her palm.) One morning delight was to see visitors turning themselves into porters, lopsiding through the market muttering "Permeso," with sacks of newly-bought blankets cradled on their backs.
It is best to attack a market like this with a purpose. To decide you cannot live, say, without a jaguar mask allows you to disregard the lion, devil, quetzal, deer, monkey, dog, crocodile, cock, horse, wolf, conquistadore, parrot, bull, Moor, and cow masks. Certainly the quality has gone down with more visitors; virtually none of those masks had ever seen ceremonial use, and there was a better selection in Antigua, which wasn’t the case a decade ago.
But most of the Chichi market, as always, is aimed at locals. I penetrated it by one lane of stalls and immediately there were no more woven bedspreads but rather the thread to make them with, and multitudes of household items: oranges, batteries in all sizes, coffee, live chickens, rope, watermelon slices, cassettes blaring competitively, a crowded restaurant with no white faces.
Men were always pushing their way through the throng, mostly Indians as small as a child (or even, dauntingly, children) doubled over, staggering resolutely forward with an organized mountain of clay pots in a nylon net on their backs. Many Guatemalan men, carrying nothing, still walk in a forward slump, as if a weight has been lifted but they can’t enjoy or even feel its absence. You come away from this country with a renewed admiration for what a determined back can bear.
Every now and then the steady market chatter was punctuated by a barrage of firecrackers; the trick was that if you suddenly saw children nearby running away, it was best to run with them.
I took a brief walk from the market square to the cemetery. It was visible from much of Chichi and made a kind of rainbow town unto itself, packed onto a ridge. Some large graves were stucco versions of churches but in bright colors; among them were simpler Mayan graves, mounds of earth surmounted by a cross with a name; others were cairns of fire-blackened rocks. Before a few graves, fires were lit among freshly-laid flowers, and women and men swung censers, spewing fumes. Rites were intoned by the professional worshippers and repeated by family members. Behind the cemetery the hillsides of pines fanned out above the town.
The larger of the square’s two churches, Santo Tomas, was immensely touching. Past women selling bunches of flowers, up a series of Mayan steps—for the church was created around 1540 on the site of an ancient temple—through a side door, as was proper, I entered a sanctuary full of people. The air was dense with incense, the scent of burnt offerings, the souls of the dead, and the weight of deeply felt prayers. Small stone slabs covered with burning candles received flower petals and ash under the ministrations of chuchkajaues, Quiche Maya prayer men, while a cofrade (an elder, not a priest) led the Catholic service at the back, where the white-walled church ended in muscular carved altars of dark wood inset with old statues and intense paintings.
The force of this strange alliance, between the rituals of the Mayan past and Catholicism with its passionate sense of blood suffering, was overwhelming. At this church a Spanish friar around 1702 at the last minute discovered the extraordinary manuscript, now lost, of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche creation myth, secretly written down in the 1550s in the Roman alphabet. Fortunately the friar translated it into Spanish, and saved it for the world.
Back in Antigua, I decided to get my horoscope mapped by a Mayan priestess named Rosa Maria Cabrera, a “bundle-gatherer,” one of about two hundred such worldwide, designated by elders. I found her when I stepped into a Spanish language school near the plaza to investigate prices; she had a kind of apartment-office off the courtyard. It was impossible even for a skeptic like myself not to take her seriously—a striking, dark-haired woman in her late forties with enormous energy, who spoke very eloquently about the mystic tradition she was part of. Indeed, she was rarely here, but usually off in the countryside.
Rosa Maria kept a replica of a Mayan altar, a room of masks, crosses, and statues, as a way of explaining to people the tradition in what she does—“so there’s no confusion between witchcraft, which is what the Catholics accused us of, and the reality, which is to venerate the four elements of earth, air, fire, water. These are equally represented in the Mayan cross, which unlike the Christian cross, is evenly balanced.” A day later she produced my astral chart in terms of the Mayan calendar; it included an accounting of the nawales (protective spirits) with me since birth and, alas, an accurate description of my character.
Not a day has gone by since I first visited Antigua when, at home, I have not thought of the place—largely because of the old masks I brought back in 1990. I purchased many of them from a Guatemalan of German background, Gwendolyn Ritz, who ran a shop in Antigua called the Casa de Artes which has been the best such for many decades. I learned, sadly, that she had drowned a few years ago; her granddaughter Karla runs the shop now, and keeps up the family practice of giving lectures on traditional arts and crafts in the schools.
Karla had mixed feelings about Antigua’s newfound chic. “We’ve become a fashionable city. So anyone from the capital with money wants to rent a house here. And they don’t necessarily see it the way we locals do—as a cultural patrimony that we have to look after with great care.”
The pall of violence was off Guatemala now, but Antigua remained much as I remembered, full of glorious ruins awaiting repair. The town’s restoration will probably never be finished, and its poignant magic comes from this. Everywhere you walk, in virtually every block (the Mayans hurrying past), you are reminded how vulnerable are the works of man, that nothing can ultimately withstand the whims of the earth—certainly not the architecture of empires.
And why, for a decade, I’d wanted to go back to Antigua, the colonial city rimmed by volcanos in Guatemala’s highlands. Once one of three Spanish capitals of the New World, Antigua was so repeatedly shattered by earthquakes that during the late 18th century it got evacuated and abandoned by government edict. Throughout the last century it has crawled back to life. Many ruins were repaired and rebuilt; writers like Aldous Huxley, visiting before World War II on the heels of a small expatriate community, recounted in impassioned tones (“one of the most romantic cities in the world”) its baroque splendor and half-devastated beauty.
During Guatemala’s recently ended 36-year civil war, the most brutal in the hemisphere, Antigua retained a magnificence and relative calm that still attracted visitors. Rather like a Guatemalan Krakow, Antigua held out as the heart of the country’s intellectual and cultural life, with plenty of museums, concerts, galleries, bookstores, and language schools. (It’s also within easy reach of Chichicastenango, the highlands town with a huge, age-old biweekly Mayan market.) I visited in 1990 for a few days and, like many foreigners, considered staying for months to rent a room inexpensively and study Spanish. But I moved on.
Now, having recently returned, I can think of no other city, not even Venice, where the architectural past is so enveloping and the present so easily held at bay. Antigua was as graceful as I remembered: a stately, walkable Spanish dream of lavish 18th century houses—block after dignified block of red or yellow, gray or green or blue stucco walls like rinds of seared fruit, with modest balconies and formal white moldings and tiled roofs. As if confirming the propriety of the secluded life within, their wooden doors are massive, bigger than horse-carriages, with knockers shaped like lions’ heads, pointed shields, arcing fish, or hands. Cars are forced to roll slowly along the uneven, immaculate cobblestoned streets, and no billboards or shop signs are allowed. One day in Antigua made me realize how much a modern fatigue that we take for granted is simply visual overload.
At the end of every street rose the slopes of volcanos, now plumed in mists, now glittering green in broad sunlight, looming like a false threat when for centuries the true danger has relentlessly come from below—from the uncertain, tremor-prone ground. It could be an allegory of Guatemala’s tragic politics, that the very earth might swallow up anyone’s life without warning.
But that danger seemed in the past. As a French travel agent who has lived in Antigua for over a decade pointed out to me, there’s now even a Guatemalan middle class. “And for people in the capital, Antigua has become the chic weekend spot. It’s driven the house rentals crazy. To buy a large old house is now a million dollars, because there’s nowhere like Antigua, and it’s only a square mile. Then after you buy the house it’s impossible to change it. You want to put a new doorway in an old wall? Forget it.”
As Friday afternoon waned, I sat in the Plaza Mayorbeneath purple jacaranda trees and watched the gentle promenade of the town, infinitely more relaxed than on my first visit. A band of brass, clarinets, and drums took their time between numbers; later they were replaced by a marimba orchestra who kept fizzing well after dark. Indians (the women in striped dresses and baggy blouses) stood in line outside the banks, whose tellers must be among the most sluggish in the world.
Guatemalans are a beautiful people—the Mayans more than the ladinos of primarily Spanish blood. Built low to the ground, they trot along at top speed with no effort, often with a pot or a load of blankets balanced impossibly on their heads, walking faster than everyone else, awkward in their posture but with stolid purpose. Their faces are open, with much inward delight and the struggle well masked. It seemed evident that the two peoples have always moved at two different tempi.
Everyone met on equal footing in Antigua’s hub, that plaza with its columned arcades, cathedral, cafes, and municipal nerve center. In recent years all the street lights have become 19th century-style lampposts, faithfully copied, like the lanterns hung from hotels, restaurants, and private homes. The result, as night fell, was that the shadows belonged to another age; the lamps came alive, as if upon a classic novel into which modern people and their ghostlike motorcars trespassed.
I saw the original lamps in the Colonial Museum, right on the square, along with a collection of cannons, pistols, and the busty stone mermaids lopped off the central fountain in the last century and later replaced. There were also crossbows, drums, rifles, spears, and arrows—pride in violence, and pride in the history of Guatemala (independent since 1821, over a dozen revolutions in the 20th century alone).
Next door a Museum of the Book contained an early edition of Don Quixote and volumes made here on the first printing press in the New World (1660), whose replica resembles a fiendish torture device. Many were treatises or grammars of indigenous languages, like the Maya, whose books the Spanish conquistadores had systematically destroyed. (To paraphrase Huxley: I can appreciate irony on my own, I do not need to have it underlined for me.)
Beyond the printed story there was anecdote. Many families have been here for many generations, and tales from before the 1773 earthquake and Antigua’s abandonment still circulate.
“Oh, there are a lot of stories,” an amateur historian named Hector told me. “Centuries ago there was a count in Antigua. Very important, always coming and going, because back in those days Guatemala wasn’t what it is today, no sir, it went from Chiapas in Mexico all the way through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Anyway, the count had a wife of considerable beauty. And whenever he was away he left her in the care of a servant—not another woman, but a butler. Eventually, you know, there was an understanding between the lady of the house and the butler. One day the count came back from his adventures and surprised them in the middle of, well, their own adventures. So the count got his men to open one wall as if for a cupboard, and he had the butler walled in. Alive.” He paused to savor this solution. “This was in a house right on the square, that’s now the Cafe Condesa, in the back. We always used to hear the story, just like many ghost stories Antigua is full of. Very dubious history, of course. So some of us were surprised a few years ago when the owners were doing repairs on the cafe. They had to open up a wall, and what did they find? A skeleton, my friend, buried in the wall. Standing up.”
The 18th century Antigua that survives is on a smaller scale than the 16th century original, for the early massive earthquakes made clear that those grand, Madrid structures were untenable. A typical story was the Church of El Merced, my favorite—a gigantic yellow wedding cake decorated in white icing, with children playing soccer among tortilla-women on its square. Its history summarizes Antigua. Construction begun in 1548; ruined by a huge earthquake in 1717. After years of restoration, another massive quake in 1773. Then centuries of neglect. Now mostly rebuilt, in the still-shattered arcade of its convent stands the biggest fountain in Central America—nude angels containing the waters—with bougainvillaea grown cunningly into the broken walls above.
Those earthquakes had never halted the appeal of the many-domed Church of San Francisco, one of the largest in Antigua, similarly destroyed and rebuilt but with one chapel which never closed. It is devoted to a beatified 17th century Franciscan monk named Pedro, buried within awaiting sainthood, who still attracts pilgrims praying for his aid. On display are his tattered clothes, the skull he used “for meditating on death,” and a pile of wooden crutches no longer needed by those “who received favors.”
These days most foreigners came to stay for weeks on end, studying Spanish; Antigua was full of young Europeans getting, say, thirty hours of private language studies a week for around sixty bucks. Some were from the USA, but unfortunately a lot of visitors from the States were still fighting a war.
This was for the religious loyalties of the Guatemalans, who have (depending on their background) a vast array of surviving Indian beliefs and also their own peculiar version of Catholicism, which incorporates an elaborate set of Mayan images. You’d think the centuries-old confluence of these two rivers would be enough, but a relentless North American stream of evangelists and “bridge-builders” from the Christian right were determined to divert and convert wherever possible. As on my last visit, I kept running into hordes of these self-satisfied do-gooders in sensible shoes, wielding their pamphlets and maps—a United Fruit Company of the soul. In the phone book for this part of Guatemala alone I counted six columns of such organizations; the result was a sign you might see in Antigua windows, saying in Spanish:
WE DO NOT ACCEPT HOUSE CALLS AND PROPAGANDA
One expatriate I could admire left his house open to the public. This was the Casa Popenoe, dating from 1632, the result of a love affair with Guatemala by an agronomist, Wilson Popenoe, and his wife Dorothy, an archaeologist who authored the first guidebook to Antigua and died young. (Their daughters occupy the house.) Louis Adamic wrote a happy 1937 memoir of an extended sojourn there that details how the house, one of the oldest in Antigua, was carefully restored by the Popenoes after they bought it as a ruin in 1929.
It is built typically around an inner patio whose calm garden is ruled by a great tree and bowl-like fountain and linked to smaller courtyards, their white walls lined with a superb collection of old bowls and tiles. The austere bedrooms, the library and salons, are full of colonial portraits and grave carved furniture. I clambered up spiral stairs to Popenoe’s study, a remnant of the colonial-era mail service—formerly a carrier-pigeon coop, with 115 bird nooks. Then onto the roof, with an all-embracing view of Antigua and its brooding volcanos swathed in mists and green forest. No wonder Adamic had felt he was in a writer’s heaven.
Chichicastenango is a highlands town of 5,000, clinging to its hills a couple of hours’ drive northwest of Antigua. I went, like so many foreigners, for its monumental Thursday and Sunday market, which takes over the small main square between two churches and becomes a dense metropolis of stalls shaded by plastic tarps on rough wood poles. The market is sometimes sniffily described as touristic, but this is a peripheral view, for only the outer stalls are for foreigners—weavings, statues, pottery, and masks. (The specialty of each strolling Mayan girl was tiny prayer dolls for children to tell their worries to, crowded into a box the size of her palm.) One morning delight was to see visitors turning themselves into porters, lopsiding through the market muttering "Permeso," with sacks of newly-bought blankets cradled on their backs.
It is best to attack a market like this with a purpose. To decide you cannot live, say, without a jaguar mask allows you to disregard the lion, devil, quetzal, deer, monkey, dog, crocodile, cock, horse, wolf, conquistadore, parrot, bull, Moor, and cow masks. Certainly the quality has gone down with more visitors; virtually none of those masks had ever seen ceremonial use, and there was a better selection in Antigua, which wasn’t the case a decade ago.
But most of the Chichi market, as always, is aimed at locals. I penetrated it by one lane of stalls and immediately there were no more woven bedspreads but rather the thread to make them with, and multitudes of household items: oranges, batteries in all sizes, coffee, live chickens, rope, watermelon slices, cassettes blaring competitively, a crowded restaurant with no white faces.
Men were always pushing their way through the throng, mostly Indians as small as a child (or even, dauntingly, children) doubled over, staggering resolutely forward with an organized mountain of clay pots in a nylon net on their backs. Many Guatemalan men, carrying nothing, still walk in a forward slump, as if a weight has been lifted but they can’t enjoy or even feel its absence. You come away from this country with a renewed admiration for what a determined back can bear.
Every now and then the steady market chatter was punctuated by a barrage of firecrackers; the trick was that if you suddenly saw children nearby running away, it was best to run with them.
I took a brief walk from the market square to the cemetery. It was visible from much of Chichi and made a kind of rainbow town unto itself, packed onto a ridge. Some large graves were stucco versions of churches but in bright colors; among them were simpler Mayan graves, mounds of earth surmounted by a cross with a name; others were cairns of fire-blackened rocks. Before a few graves, fires were lit among freshly-laid flowers, and women and men swung censers, spewing fumes. Rites were intoned by the professional worshippers and repeated by family members. Behind the cemetery the hillsides of pines fanned out above the town.
The larger of the square’s two churches, Santo Tomas, was immensely touching. Past women selling bunches of flowers, up a series of Mayan steps—for the church was created around 1540 on the site of an ancient temple—through a side door, as was proper, I entered a sanctuary full of people. The air was dense with incense, the scent of burnt offerings, the souls of the dead, and the weight of deeply felt prayers. Small stone slabs covered with burning candles received flower petals and ash under the ministrations of chuchkajaues, Quiche Maya prayer men, while a cofrade (an elder, not a priest) led the Catholic service at the back, where the white-walled church ended in muscular carved altars of dark wood inset with old statues and intense paintings.
The force of this strange alliance, between the rituals of the Mayan past and Catholicism with its passionate sense of blood suffering, was overwhelming. At this church a Spanish friar around 1702 at the last minute discovered the extraordinary manuscript, now lost, of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche creation myth, secretly written down in the 1550s in the Roman alphabet. Fortunately the friar translated it into Spanish, and saved it for the world.
Back in Antigua, I decided to get my horoscope mapped by a Mayan priestess named Rosa Maria Cabrera, a “bundle-gatherer,” one of about two hundred such worldwide, designated by elders. I found her when I stepped into a Spanish language school near the plaza to investigate prices; she had a kind of apartment-office off the courtyard. It was impossible even for a skeptic like myself not to take her seriously—a striking, dark-haired woman in her late forties with enormous energy, who spoke very eloquently about the mystic tradition she was part of. Indeed, she was rarely here, but usually off in the countryside.
Rosa Maria kept a replica of a Mayan altar, a room of masks, crosses, and statues, as a way of explaining to people the tradition in what she does—“so there’s no confusion between witchcraft, which is what the Catholics accused us of, and the reality, which is to venerate the four elements of earth, air, fire, water. These are equally represented in the Mayan cross, which unlike the Christian cross, is evenly balanced.” A day later she produced my astral chart in terms of the Mayan calendar; it included an accounting of the nawales (protective spirits) with me since birth and, alas, an accurate description of my character.
Not a day has gone by since I first visited Antigua when, at home, I have not thought of the place—largely because of the old masks I brought back in 1990. I purchased many of them from a Guatemalan of German background, Gwendolyn Ritz, who ran a shop in Antigua called the Casa de Artes which has been the best such for many decades. I learned, sadly, that she had drowned a few years ago; her granddaughter Karla runs the shop now, and keeps up the family practice of giving lectures on traditional arts and crafts in the schools.
Karla had mixed feelings about Antigua’s newfound chic. “We’ve become a fashionable city. So anyone from the capital with money wants to rent a house here. And they don’t necessarily see it the way we locals do—as a cultural patrimony that we have to look after with great care.”
The pall of violence was off Guatemala now, but Antigua remained much as I remembered, full of glorious ruins awaiting repair. The town’s restoration will probably never be finished, and its poignant magic comes from this. Everywhere you walk, in virtually every block (the Mayans hurrying past), you are reminded how vulnerable are the works of man, that nothing can ultimately withstand the whims of the earth—certainly not the architecture of empires.
Monday, June 15, 1998
Rio
Written in 1998 for Sky magazine
To anyone over thirty, Rio de Janeiro represents fantasy—a bossa-nova vision of tropical sea, eternal beach, and luxuriant mountains. Alone of the world's great cities, its chic status is wholly a product of the 20th century, aptly summed up in one Brazilian song of a girl, a man, a guitar, Ipanema. I went there fearing the worst: that Rio's physical glory would be no more, and that its severe, well-known poverty, with a corollary of street crime, made it a city impossible to enjoy and relax in. I was glad to be so wrong, to find Rio so much cleaner, greener, calmer, and more joyful than I expected, and to learn how much you could enjoy it even when the season wasn't carnaval.
Because so much of Rio life and culture revolves around its beaches, and the natural beauty of the place and its people, it’s easy for a visitor to overlook everything else. That said, if there is a more wondrous natural location for humans to live en masse, I do not know it. A succession of massive hills, crags, and upheavals, undulant and forested a thick green, stretch off into islets; ingenious landfill has completed the design. Water is everywhere. The colors are simple: blue sea, green mountains, and the white pillboxes of modern man that endlessly multiply. A giant interior lagoon gives the illusion that the entire city is a cutout laid on the sea, all lassoed by nearly fifty miles of beach.
Every great city has an energy of its own—and Rio’s does not resemble that of any other, for its denizens have a vibrant, unmatched genius for pleasure no matter what their circumstances. Beyond the outrageous splendor of the setting, you are first also struck by the glow and athleticism of the people. To say that cariocas (as Rio-dwellers are known) seem to spend all their free time at the beach misses the essential point, which is that they’re always doing something there, always in motion: playing volleyball, or sand soccer, or a horrendously difficult local specialty, foot-volleyball, which combines both. Walk along the hotel-lined Avenida Atlantica that follows the gentle arc of Copacabana Beach, and from dawn till past midnight you see men and women of all ages running, walking, doing yoga, exercising, or tossing a ball; kids are busy on their own bungee-swings and trampolines. The beach is Rio’s gym, its sports arena, and its savior—miraculous, that in a city of so much poverty there should be so many free pastimes granted by nature. No wonder the cariocas have such a finely developed sense of ironic humor.
The first thing every visitor should do is take the cable car up Sugarloaf, the higher of two adjacent peaks. It gives an immediate sense of how, edging up to a jungle like broccoli, the fortunate city has spread its many neighborhoods around the bays, beaches, and green pillars that stand like bodyguards for its bays. The cable car makes the ascent easy; for fourteen hours daily it carries you to Morro da Urca (705 feet) then up to Pao de Acucar (1,300 feet). Seen from miles away, the Christ statue on Corcovado peak pokes through the cloud layer, and Copacabana, the curving beach lined with big hotels that is Rio’s emblem, seems pristine amid the peace a vista imposes—especially at sunset, as the lights begin to twinkle and the view becomes surreal. That so many people are living amid such poetry lifts your heart.
The other essential expedition is up Corcovado, “The Hunchback,” by road or cogwheel train. From the granite mountain’s summit, at 2,300 feet, rises Christ the Redeemer, a hundred feet tall. The statue, a thousand graceful tons of him, floats into your gaze as you climb the sunlit steps; its genius is that first you see only his white-robed back, his outstretched arms; you cannot see his face until you reach the top and walk around the massive pedestal. This statue is with you constantly in Rio—tremendous arms embracing a swimming sky, his pose a gentle echo of crucifixion, turning his back on jungly hillsides to gather in his city of seven millions. He is a reminder of the Brazilian paradox: that as the largest Catholic country on earth, much of its cultural strength comes from the syncretism of its many other religions and beliefs.
Carnaval is the ultimate proof. Though it’s widely known as the time to be in Rio, there’s a lot to be said for visiting in the winter leading up to the great event instead. One reason is that the city’s youthful energy is increased because it’s the southern hemisphere’s summer—school holidays last from mid-December until after carnaval. Many cariocas say the New Year’s Eve celebrations are preferable and nearly as monumental. (This is the second largest open-air party in the world, after carnaval.) An enormous beach party stretches up the shore, with music, candles, and flowers thrown on the waves as offerings to Iemenja, goddess of the sea—a version of the Virgin Mary who’s Rio’s patron saint. Hovering over all are fireworks and laser displays off Sugarloaf and Corcovado.
For a winter visitor, the way to experience carnaval is to take part in a Rio samba “school”—though team or club is closer to the reality. Everyone in Brazil has loyalty to one samba school; each one here has about 4,000 cariocas. Each year, every samba school has its own colors and theme behind the inevitably graceful, incandescent dancing and singing, the legion of drummers and lavish costumes—its theme might be criticizing the government, or making an ecological statement, for example. When carnaval comes in mid-February, the sixteen samba schools (who’ve been practicing since August) compete by passing through the Sambodromo stadium.
An outsider can witness and take part in the samba schools’ rehearsals, usually Saturday but sometimes Friday and Sunday nights as well, starting around ten p.m. This will mean learning to undulate: cariocas like to see you joining in, not chickening out. (Three samba schools to try are Mangueira, Salgueiro, and Portela.)
Ultimately, the great idea and ideal Rio has given the world is of the beach as a place of physical as well as social chic. In most harbor cities the rich live on hillsides and the poor live below; in Rio the opposite is true, which testifies to the enduring allure of its sands. Physical beauty can also be a powerful class-crossing democratizer, and as a result Rio’s beaches have specific areas with the human display at its most competitive—based around seven women per man (the local legend goes), though contrary to repute the women rarely go topless. Rio has twenty-three beaches, stretching forty-five miles; a visitor should try several.
The craze for the city as a glamorous destination dates from the Thirties, built around the dual glow of carnaval and the beach life. Over the years Rio has kept spreading at such speed that yesterday’s wild, untouched beach is today’s big development. The most famous stretch, the three miles of Copacabana hotels, turns a sharp corner to Ipanema and Leblon, with their richer and more residential feel. At Sao Conrado there’s small Pepino beach; next comes Barra di Tijuca, eleven clean miles that at the moment are sprouting the condominiums of choice, though part is a protected ecological zone. Beyond it, Recreio is a gorgeous empty beach, with a few coconut-water shacks and real estate getting more expensive by the minute; at the end, Prainha is the beach for surfistas. After it, near the Pontal museum, is Grumari, almost virginal, where I saw old men fishing with poles for anchovies. It’s out here the old Rio exists, if you go far enough: the long ribbons of sand, quiet mile after mile narrowing and widening.
To make finding friends easier there are numbered lifeguard stations along each beach (on Ipanema the primo meeting-point is near Lifeguard Station #9). The absolutely chic spot is on Barra beach between kiosk #1 and #2 and especially around the snack bar Pepe’s, famous for its fruit juices and health food. Named after a champion surfer and hang-glider, over the years Pepe’s has become a meeting-point for the young, hip, beautiful people. Rocky islets add to the view. Here the beach is wide, the bikinis narrow; fierce volleyball games are under way. Both the men exercising, and the women striding up and back, up and back, seem equally competitive.
Rio is a vast city of articulated neighborhoods; the one where I’d happily move is hilly Santa Teresa. All tiny mansions, cobblestones, labyrinthine lanes, walled gardens, wheezing trams, and almost no concrete, it should be explored on foot. Its epicenter is the Bar do Arnaudo (a restaurant as well), frequented by celebrity exile Ronnie Biggs, leader of England’s 1963 Great Train Robbery.
A profound pleasure of this country is its coffee—readily available at about $1 a pound in any supermarket—and to seek out Rio’s best cafes is an admirable project if you find yourself, as I did, falling asleep on the beach. One of the most popular modern salons, as intimate as a large walk-in closet, is in Ipanema: the Armazem do Café, with thirty types of coffee, plenty of Cuban cigars, books celebrating the national drink, and a vivid wall-mural of a coffee plantation, circa 1830. (Ask for a cafezinho, a “little coffee”). Not far away, en route to the beach, is the Garota da Ipanema (“The Girl from Ipanema”) Bar, where the song was written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and his friend, lyricist Vinicius de Morais, sitting there watching her go by.
Apart from coffee, the best deal in Rio is the city’s virtual uniform, the swimsuit. To cariocas they mean even more than T-shirts do to North Americans, and as a result they are available everywhere in a million designs and at bargain rates. Brazil may be the only country in the world where bikinis are priced not by the chic of the design but by the centimeters of fabric, for they are remarkably skimpy and inexpensive. This is only good news, as long as it’s Brazilians wearing them.
The venerable cafes from Rio’s deep past are all downtown. The oldest is the modest Casa Cave, which occupies a busy corner and is easily overlooked. Founded in 1790, rebuilt in 1920, it’s somewhat time-worn. Nearby, the Confeitaria Colombo is the most famous surviving 19th century café—a grand art-nouveau salon, with marble walls, tiled floors, belle-epoque lamps, and a stained glass ceiling. Lunch is its busiest time; traditionally the street was full of fashion boutiques, and the cafe (founded 1894) was where Rio’s high society came to relax. One octogenarian, a former cabinet minister, has visited daily for over fifty years.
An even more lavish luncheon cafe is the Cafe de Theatre, from 1909, on one side of the Teatro Municipal—done up in grandiose Assyrian style, with winged bulls with bearded heads, Oriental hanging lamps, muscular columns, gorgeous tilework; on the outside are mosaics of opera scenes. The theater itself is a copy in granite, marble, and bronze, of the Paris Opera. It stands at one end of the Avenida Rio Branco, the city’s 1905 version of the Champs-Elysees; that era’s one-hundred-fifteen classical buildings have over the decades been reduced to ten, victims of the postwar concrete boom.
What does remain from the colonial centuries is wonderful. (The Portuguese arrived in 1502; Brazil became independent in 1822.) Rio’s wealth was built on gold, sugarcane, and coffee, and the most evocative patch of Old Rio’s prosperity is off Praza Quinza—the intimate Arco do Teles. A late-18th century tract of townhouses and cobbled lanes, it now has chic renovated bars with live music and modern art galleries.
Other real treasures, mostly churches, have survived. The most impressive is the stone-towered Sao Bento Monastery, from 1630. Its interior is full extraordinary Portuguese baroque: a teeming, scrolled universe of wriggling gilded figures, walls, and altars, carved from jacaranda wood, all lit by stained glass whose colors seem ethereal against the dark gold everywhere. Another treasure is the Gloria, a sparse white church (1714) with well-preserved tiles of angels playing harps and the imperial Portuguese crown. Delicate painted ceilings portray the small church amid flowers on Rio’s hills.
And below Corcovado is the Largo do Boticario, a small square named after the royal druggist who settled here in 1831. Architecturally the seven townhouses in the big-stoned courtyard, shaded by enormous trees, represent an eclectic 19th century style: latticework balconies, massive doors, elaborate ironwork, and pink, yellow, green, and blue colonial-era tiles showing large parrots, Maltese crosses, and Dutch windmills.
Rio’s profound European heritage is most evident at the city’s many museums, which visitors often skip. Downtown are the exhaustive National History Museum and the National Museum of Fine Arts, with a huge collection of Brazilian art from the last two centuries. The Museum of the Republic, with a courtyard of royal palms, was in the 1860s a coffee planter’s lavish mansion and then the presidents’ palace for six decades. After one committed suicide in 1954 it became a museum devoted to the country’s history, with a healthy dose of self-criticism.
The Museum of Modern Art boasts changing contemporary exhibitions and sculptures by Brancusi, Rodin, Leger, Lipchitz, Giacometti, Arp, and Moore. The best modern art museum is the Chacara do Ceu, an industrialist’s personal collection that includes Dali, Monet, Picasso, Degas, Modigliani, Braque, Matisse, and the Brazilian master Portinari.
There’s even a museum devoted wholly to Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer-dancer who made it big in Hollywood (“Bananas is my business!”) in the 1940s. Here she’s become a saint of carnaval culture, especially among Rio’s transvestites. The museum is full of her trademark blue, red, yellow, and green umbrellas, her jewelry, her elaborate embroidered and fishnet costumes, her high platform shoes and complex gargantuan headdresses.
Two museums over a half hour’s drive from Copacabana might accompany a day’s beach expedition. The first is the estate of Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), the country’s preeminent landscape architect, who designed the wavery tiled sidewalks that are a symbol of Rio. On a former plantation, with its winding cobbled road, Marx’s garden is an organized jungle. Here he planted 250 species of palm trees alone, and designed a house incorporating diverse European, Brazilian, and African elements—his trademark.
A few miles farther out is my favorite, the Casa do Pontal. It is a nuisance to get to but not to be missed: the world’s largest collection of Brazilian folk art, in a country house set between the sea and an ecological preserve. Among 5,000 sculptures by over two hundred artists from all regions of Brazil, the majority are amazing small painted clay figures—musicians, street sweepers, medical operations, farmers, a levitating magician, skeletons and robots copulating, wrestlers, fishermen with nets, a soccer team, billiards players, knife swallowers, and an entire circus scene in mid-performance. The most stunning is a mechanized panorama of carnaval, showing two samba schools in high gear, complete with headdresses, teams of drummers, pell-mell crowds.
Rio lives not just for its beaches but for its nightlife. For dancing, El Turf is an elegant annex of Rio’s racing club, turned into a high-tech disco within a classical shell. Each marble table has the innovation of a self-service tap for draft beer, with a meter tallied by the waiter when you’re ready to go. The mood is gentle, like a New York club full of dancing young Brazilians who, from the neck down, could not possibly be Anglo-Saxons.
The national genius for music ranges in this century from the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to the many genres of popular music which seem to be everywhere in this city. The best known outside Brazil, of course, is the bossa nova, which so hypnotized the world in the 1960s. A reliable spot to hear first-rate bossa is Chiko’s—a sleek, elegant club with a jungle of tropical plants behind the piano. Another is the renovated Banco do Brasil Cultural Center downtown, with several concert spaces.
Best of all, though, is to visit one of the samba clubs—like the Casa da Mae Joana, where I heard some of the most beautiful music of my life one breezy midnight; or Sobrenatural, up in Santa Teresa just near the Bar de Arnaudo. Of the big dance-halls, I preferred Estudantina Musical. (These places often don’t get going till midnight.) A tiny spot where you can hear great samba at dinnertime and get a good pizza is the Butiquim do Martinho, set improbably in a huge shopping mall.
No matter where you are, though, no matter what instruments, the magic seems the same: the glorious melodies unfurl, the lyrics follow in their soft Portuguese diction. These songs will always be Rio, and evoke the era when Rio was an ideal to the rest of the world. The 1950s and ’60s were its time; to hear that music is to dwell in the eternal Rio, that majestic beach of the soul between verdant mountains— the city which the sea folds in an endless embrace as Christ the Redeemer looks down on the beautiful men and women dancing and blesses them with a loving melody that time cannot silence, a melody that will go on as long as these things matter.
To anyone over thirty, Rio de Janeiro represents fantasy—a bossa-nova vision of tropical sea, eternal beach, and luxuriant mountains. Alone of the world's great cities, its chic status is wholly a product of the 20th century, aptly summed up in one Brazilian song of a girl, a man, a guitar, Ipanema. I went there fearing the worst: that Rio's physical glory would be no more, and that its severe, well-known poverty, with a corollary of street crime, made it a city impossible to enjoy and relax in. I was glad to be so wrong, to find Rio so much cleaner, greener, calmer, and more joyful than I expected, and to learn how much you could enjoy it even when the season wasn't carnaval.
Because so much of Rio life and culture revolves around its beaches, and the natural beauty of the place and its people, it’s easy for a visitor to overlook everything else. That said, if there is a more wondrous natural location for humans to live en masse, I do not know it. A succession of massive hills, crags, and upheavals, undulant and forested a thick green, stretch off into islets; ingenious landfill has completed the design. Water is everywhere. The colors are simple: blue sea, green mountains, and the white pillboxes of modern man that endlessly multiply. A giant interior lagoon gives the illusion that the entire city is a cutout laid on the sea, all lassoed by nearly fifty miles of beach.
Every great city has an energy of its own—and Rio’s does not resemble that of any other, for its denizens have a vibrant, unmatched genius for pleasure no matter what their circumstances. Beyond the outrageous splendor of the setting, you are first also struck by the glow and athleticism of the people. To say that cariocas (as Rio-dwellers are known) seem to spend all their free time at the beach misses the essential point, which is that they’re always doing something there, always in motion: playing volleyball, or sand soccer, or a horrendously difficult local specialty, foot-volleyball, which combines both. Walk along the hotel-lined Avenida Atlantica that follows the gentle arc of Copacabana Beach, and from dawn till past midnight you see men and women of all ages running, walking, doing yoga, exercising, or tossing a ball; kids are busy on their own bungee-swings and trampolines. The beach is Rio’s gym, its sports arena, and its savior—miraculous, that in a city of so much poverty there should be so many free pastimes granted by nature. No wonder the cariocas have such a finely developed sense of ironic humor.
The first thing every visitor should do is take the cable car up Sugarloaf, the higher of two adjacent peaks. It gives an immediate sense of how, edging up to a jungle like broccoli, the fortunate city has spread its many neighborhoods around the bays, beaches, and green pillars that stand like bodyguards for its bays. The cable car makes the ascent easy; for fourteen hours daily it carries you to Morro da Urca (705 feet) then up to Pao de Acucar (1,300 feet). Seen from miles away, the Christ statue on Corcovado peak pokes through the cloud layer, and Copacabana, the curving beach lined with big hotels that is Rio’s emblem, seems pristine amid the peace a vista imposes—especially at sunset, as the lights begin to twinkle and the view becomes surreal. That so many people are living amid such poetry lifts your heart.
The other essential expedition is up Corcovado, “The Hunchback,” by road or cogwheel train. From the granite mountain’s summit, at 2,300 feet, rises Christ the Redeemer, a hundred feet tall. The statue, a thousand graceful tons of him, floats into your gaze as you climb the sunlit steps; its genius is that first you see only his white-robed back, his outstretched arms; you cannot see his face until you reach the top and walk around the massive pedestal. This statue is with you constantly in Rio—tremendous arms embracing a swimming sky, his pose a gentle echo of crucifixion, turning his back on jungly hillsides to gather in his city of seven millions. He is a reminder of the Brazilian paradox: that as the largest Catholic country on earth, much of its cultural strength comes from the syncretism of its many other religions and beliefs.
Carnaval is the ultimate proof. Though it’s widely known as the time to be in Rio, there’s a lot to be said for visiting in the winter leading up to the great event instead. One reason is that the city’s youthful energy is increased because it’s the southern hemisphere’s summer—school holidays last from mid-December until after carnaval. Many cariocas say the New Year’s Eve celebrations are preferable and nearly as monumental. (This is the second largest open-air party in the world, after carnaval.) An enormous beach party stretches up the shore, with music, candles, and flowers thrown on the waves as offerings to Iemenja, goddess of the sea—a version of the Virgin Mary who’s Rio’s patron saint. Hovering over all are fireworks and laser displays off Sugarloaf and Corcovado.
For a winter visitor, the way to experience carnaval is to take part in a Rio samba “school”—though team or club is closer to the reality. Everyone in Brazil has loyalty to one samba school; each one here has about 4,000 cariocas. Each year, every samba school has its own colors and theme behind the inevitably graceful, incandescent dancing and singing, the legion of drummers and lavish costumes—its theme might be criticizing the government, or making an ecological statement, for example. When carnaval comes in mid-February, the sixteen samba schools (who’ve been practicing since August) compete by passing through the Sambodromo stadium.
An outsider can witness and take part in the samba schools’ rehearsals, usually Saturday but sometimes Friday and Sunday nights as well, starting around ten p.m. This will mean learning to undulate: cariocas like to see you joining in, not chickening out. (Three samba schools to try are Mangueira, Salgueiro, and Portela.)
Ultimately, the great idea and ideal Rio has given the world is of the beach as a place of physical as well as social chic. In most harbor cities the rich live on hillsides and the poor live below; in Rio the opposite is true, which testifies to the enduring allure of its sands. Physical beauty can also be a powerful class-crossing democratizer, and as a result Rio’s beaches have specific areas with the human display at its most competitive—based around seven women per man (the local legend goes), though contrary to repute the women rarely go topless. Rio has twenty-three beaches, stretching forty-five miles; a visitor should try several.
The craze for the city as a glamorous destination dates from the Thirties, built around the dual glow of carnaval and the beach life. Over the years Rio has kept spreading at such speed that yesterday’s wild, untouched beach is today’s big development. The most famous stretch, the three miles of Copacabana hotels, turns a sharp corner to Ipanema and Leblon, with their richer and more residential feel. At Sao Conrado there’s small Pepino beach; next comes Barra di Tijuca, eleven clean miles that at the moment are sprouting the condominiums of choice, though part is a protected ecological zone. Beyond it, Recreio is a gorgeous empty beach, with a few coconut-water shacks and real estate getting more expensive by the minute; at the end, Prainha is the beach for surfistas. After it, near the Pontal museum, is Grumari, almost virginal, where I saw old men fishing with poles for anchovies. It’s out here the old Rio exists, if you go far enough: the long ribbons of sand, quiet mile after mile narrowing and widening.
To make finding friends easier there are numbered lifeguard stations along each beach (on Ipanema the primo meeting-point is near Lifeguard Station #9). The absolutely chic spot is on Barra beach between kiosk #1 and #2 and especially around the snack bar Pepe’s, famous for its fruit juices and health food. Named after a champion surfer and hang-glider, over the years Pepe’s has become a meeting-point for the young, hip, beautiful people. Rocky islets add to the view. Here the beach is wide, the bikinis narrow; fierce volleyball games are under way. Both the men exercising, and the women striding up and back, up and back, seem equally competitive.
Rio is a vast city of articulated neighborhoods; the one where I’d happily move is hilly Santa Teresa. All tiny mansions, cobblestones, labyrinthine lanes, walled gardens, wheezing trams, and almost no concrete, it should be explored on foot. Its epicenter is the Bar do Arnaudo (a restaurant as well), frequented by celebrity exile Ronnie Biggs, leader of England’s 1963 Great Train Robbery.
A profound pleasure of this country is its coffee—readily available at about $1 a pound in any supermarket—and to seek out Rio’s best cafes is an admirable project if you find yourself, as I did, falling asleep on the beach. One of the most popular modern salons, as intimate as a large walk-in closet, is in Ipanema: the Armazem do Café, with thirty types of coffee, plenty of Cuban cigars, books celebrating the national drink, and a vivid wall-mural of a coffee plantation, circa 1830. (Ask for a cafezinho, a “little coffee”). Not far away, en route to the beach, is the Garota da Ipanema (“The Girl from Ipanema”) Bar, where the song was written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and his friend, lyricist Vinicius de Morais, sitting there watching her go by.
Apart from coffee, the best deal in Rio is the city’s virtual uniform, the swimsuit. To cariocas they mean even more than T-shirts do to North Americans, and as a result they are available everywhere in a million designs and at bargain rates. Brazil may be the only country in the world where bikinis are priced not by the chic of the design but by the centimeters of fabric, for they are remarkably skimpy and inexpensive. This is only good news, as long as it’s Brazilians wearing them.
The venerable cafes from Rio’s deep past are all downtown. The oldest is the modest Casa Cave, which occupies a busy corner and is easily overlooked. Founded in 1790, rebuilt in 1920, it’s somewhat time-worn. Nearby, the Confeitaria Colombo is the most famous surviving 19th century café—a grand art-nouveau salon, with marble walls, tiled floors, belle-epoque lamps, and a stained glass ceiling. Lunch is its busiest time; traditionally the street was full of fashion boutiques, and the cafe (founded 1894) was where Rio’s high society came to relax. One octogenarian, a former cabinet minister, has visited daily for over fifty years.
An even more lavish luncheon cafe is the Cafe de Theatre, from 1909, on one side of the Teatro Municipal—done up in grandiose Assyrian style, with winged bulls with bearded heads, Oriental hanging lamps, muscular columns, gorgeous tilework; on the outside are mosaics of opera scenes. The theater itself is a copy in granite, marble, and bronze, of the Paris Opera. It stands at one end of the Avenida Rio Branco, the city’s 1905 version of the Champs-Elysees; that era’s one-hundred-fifteen classical buildings have over the decades been reduced to ten, victims of the postwar concrete boom.
What does remain from the colonial centuries is wonderful. (The Portuguese arrived in 1502; Brazil became independent in 1822.) Rio’s wealth was built on gold, sugarcane, and coffee, and the most evocative patch of Old Rio’s prosperity is off Praza Quinza—the intimate Arco do Teles. A late-18th century tract of townhouses and cobbled lanes, it now has chic renovated bars with live music and modern art galleries.
Other real treasures, mostly churches, have survived. The most impressive is the stone-towered Sao Bento Monastery, from 1630. Its interior is full extraordinary Portuguese baroque: a teeming, scrolled universe of wriggling gilded figures, walls, and altars, carved from jacaranda wood, all lit by stained glass whose colors seem ethereal against the dark gold everywhere. Another treasure is the Gloria, a sparse white church (1714) with well-preserved tiles of angels playing harps and the imperial Portuguese crown. Delicate painted ceilings portray the small church amid flowers on Rio’s hills.
And below Corcovado is the Largo do Boticario, a small square named after the royal druggist who settled here in 1831. Architecturally the seven townhouses in the big-stoned courtyard, shaded by enormous trees, represent an eclectic 19th century style: latticework balconies, massive doors, elaborate ironwork, and pink, yellow, green, and blue colonial-era tiles showing large parrots, Maltese crosses, and Dutch windmills.
Rio’s profound European heritage is most evident at the city’s many museums, which visitors often skip. Downtown are the exhaustive National History Museum and the National Museum of Fine Arts, with a huge collection of Brazilian art from the last two centuries. The Museum of the Republic, with a courtyard of royal palms, was in the 1860s a coffee planter’s lavish mansion and then the presidents’ palace for six decades. After one committed suicide in 1954 it became a museum devoted to the country’s history, with a healthy dose of self-criticism.
The Museum of Modern Art boasts changing contemporary exhibitions and sculptures by Brancusi, Rodin, Leger, Lipchitz, Giacometti, Arp, and Moore. The best modern art museum is the Chacara do Ceu, an industrialist’s personal collection that includes Dali, Monet, Picasso, Degas, Modigliani, Braque, Matisse, and the Brazilian master Portinari.
There’s even a museum devoted wholly to Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer-dancer who made it big in Hollywood (“Bananas is my business!”) in the 1940s. Here she’s become a saint of carnaval culture, especially among Rio’s transvestites. The museum is full of her trademark blue, red, yellow, and green umbrellas, her jewelry, her elaborate embroidered and fishnet costumes, her high platform shoes and complex gargantuan headdresses.
Two museums over a half hour’s drive from Copacabana might accompany a day’s beach expedition. The first is the estate of Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), the country’s preeminent landscape architect, who designed the wavery tiled sidewalks that are a symbol of Rio. On a former plantation, with its winding cobbled road, Marx’s garden is an organized jungle. Here he planted 250 species of palm trees alone, and designed a house incorporating diverse European, Brazilian, and African elements—his trademark.
A few miles farther out is my favorite, the Casa do Pontal. It is a nuisance to get to but not to be missed: the world’s largest collection of Brazilian folk art, in a country house set between the sea and an ecological preserve. Among 5,000 sculptures by over two hundred artists from all regions of Brazil, the majority are amazing small painted clay figures—musicians, street sweepers, medical operations, farmers, a levitating magician, skeletons and robots copulating, wrestlers, fishermen with nets, a soccer team, billiards players, knife swallowers, and an entire circus scene in mid-performance. The most stunning is a mechanized panorama of carnaval, showing two samba schools in high gear, complete with headdresses, teams of drummers, pell-mell crowds.
Rio lives not just for its beaches but for its nightlife. For dancing, El Turf is an elegant annex of Rio’s racing club, turned into a high-tech disco within a classical shell. Each marble table has the innovation of a self-service tap for draft beer, with a meter tallied by the waiter when you’re ready to go. The mood is gentle, like a New York club full of dancing young Brazilians who, from the neck down, could not possibly be Anglo-Saxons.
The national genius for music ranges in this century from the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to the many genres of popular music which seem to be everywhere in this city. The best known outside Brazil, of course, is the bossa nova, which so hypnotized the world in the 1960s. A reliable spot to hear first-rate bossa is Chiko’s—a sleek, elegant club with a jungle of tropical plants behind the piano. Another is the renovated Banco do Brasil Cultural Center downtown, with several concert spaces.
Best of all, though, is to visit one of the samba clubs—like the Casa da Mae Joana, where I heard some of the most beautiful music of my life one breezy midnight; or Sobrenatural, up in Santa Teresa just near the Bar de Arnaudo. Of the big dance-halls, I preferred Estudantina Musical. (These places often don’t get going till midnight.) A tiny spot where you can hear great samba at dinnertime and get a good pizza is the Butiquim do Martinho, set improbably in a huge shopping mall.
No matter where you are, though, no matter what instruments, the magic seems the same: the glorious melodies unfurl, the lyrics follow in their soft Portuguese diction. These songs will always be Rio, and evoke the era when Rio was an ideal to the rest of the world. The 1950s and ’60s were its time; to hear that music is to dwell in the eternal Rio, that majestic beach of the soul between verdant mountains— the city which the sea folds in an endless embrace as Christ the Redeemer looks down on the beautiful men and women dancing and blesses them with a loving melody that time cannot silence, a melody that will go on as long as these things matter.
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