Exotic Destinations

A couple of years ago my wife and I decided to rejoin our lives and take a vacation. Our kids were eight and three, old enough, we hoped, where a single error in planning or execution would not plunge the entire mammoth undertaking into ruin and recrimination. We were done with the baby years at least: no diapers, no bottles or strollers, though of course we packed twice as many swimsuits as we needed, twice as much sunscreen, twice as much everything. And we packed books, because that is generally our approach to the possibility of worst case scenarios - to sickness, sulks, or hurricanes. For better or worse, they are the anchors in our days, and the anchors in our suitcase as well. We could have smuggled a poodle into the Caribbean between all of those covers.

A week before we left I’d made a quick stop off at the library, read some first pages, and plucked out a number of titles to match every challenging moment I could imagine. (Four or five pounds of Harry Potter was sufficient to redirect our eight-year-old). Not accidentally, we took with us a book called Swimming Lessons by Betsy Jay, about a girl who absolutely refuses to dip so much as her toes in the water until she decides to set an example for someone younger and more genuinely terrified, when the legend she enjoys telling about herself becomes secondary to her truer, braver nature - or something like that. It’s a good little story and a pretty funny book – someone wears a muumuu, the girl think she’s a cat – and there are probably children for whom it proves motivational; they just don’t happen to be mine.

Antimotivational? Is that a word? The world is full of scary things – deep water, violent toilets, fresh fruits, sneaky parents. Some kids know a lesson whether it is featured in the title or not. My youngest spent seven straight days anchored to the broiling shore with one or another of his parents awaiting the twice-daily arrival of a fake pirate ship selling coconuts and twenty-dollar conchs. In the pool he hardly ventured off the two top steps, jaw set tight, lips aquiver.

“You okay?” we kept asking.

He wasn’t okay. None of us were, exactly. The boys spent a lot of that week catching up on their resentments and shoving Lego into each other’s ears. And whoever heard of sunscreen poisoning? My wife put so much stuff on her face that her eyes became shiny little raisins in all of the allergic swelling. The scenery was otherwise gorgeous in a Jurassic sort of way, full of hummingbirds and giant snails and stovepipe yellow coral and steep, steep mountains that meant you pretty much had to commit one way or another to the beginnings and ends of every day, and there were golf carts screaming around hairpin corners, and towels you had to rent, and baked beans for breakfast and French fries for lunch. It was the kind of pretty nice place where you wish you’d spent the extra grand to stay in a really nice place where you could have as many towels as you liked and somebody else carried your French fries up the hill.

But we tend to remember it fondly these days, owing to photographs (who takes a picture of disappointment?) and the fact that our three-year-old, now six, can barely remember a thing. There was lemony birthday cake somewhere in the middle, and the sunsets belonged on a postcard. My oldest and I saw a big, thrilling barracuda, and one night I brought home a toad. This last was on one of my ice-bucket runs down, then back up that vertical footpath, calves thrumming, shirt soaking, brain wondering what sort of drama awaited me back at the villa. That toad sat staring at me from the middle of the path where I was trying not to get killed by one of those stupid carts. I thought: “Toad!” I thought: “He is as big as my foot!”

I picked him up. He swelled, but did not otherwise resist. Ice in one hand, toad in the other, I continued up to the villa where I heard… nothing, and found the boys in bed, a pile of my selections between them, absorbed, at peace, one reading to the other in the sort of mutually rewarding diversion that is sometimes hard to come by with children who are separated by so many years.

I took a picture, and I have it in an album, though I must have still been holding the toad, because what else would I have done with him? I’m sure that it got their attention eventually, but what is remarkable to me now is the commotion I probably created, panting, ice rattling, flash dazzling, yet their spell in the picture appears sincerely unbroken.

The cover of the book is leafy green and midnight blue, the title barely legible through the glare on the library binding – The Old Man & The Astronauts it reads – so I’ve since gone looking - at the library, which doesn’t have it anymore, then Amazon finally, where fifteen copies remained when I’d done checking out.

“In Bongu,” it begins, “On the bird-shaped island of New Guinea, almost every house in the village has a transistor radio.”

Books like this have made their ways over from places like Germany, Denmark, Japan, and Melanesia where, in fact, The Old Man & The Astronauts was born. And that – the possibility of stories yet uncharted – is reason enough to visit. Because they are here. Swapped and handed down between brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces, basements and consignment stores, dusty with promise, ready to furnish new memories, or improve them.