Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  When you do scuba training—be it in Pennsylvania or in Zanzibar—you get a great deal of tutelage about what to do if your air fails, learn signs to alert your divemaster to what’s wrong, and memorize techniques to compensate for a wide variety of potential errors, failures, and dangers. But you don’t get any advice about what to do on the surface if you have somehow become invisible.

  The current was carrying me away from the boat, so I tried to swim into it. Even with my strongest freestyle stroke I didn’t make any headway, and I soon realized that I couldn’t swim into the waves, especially loaded down with the air tanks and weight belt, and keep breathing unless I kept my mask on and used the remaining air from my tanks. I’d come up to the surface in the first place because I was running out of air, and I needed that air not only to breathe but also to stay afloat, because my BCD was leaking slightly, and I had to keep reinflating it. What about my diving weights? The advantage to keeping them on was that they slowed the rate at which I was drifting away from the boat. The disadvantage was that they likewise slowed my swimming and might be increasing the drag on my ever-deflating BCD. I tried to awaken my logical mind and make a decision, but despite more than a half hour to think about it, I had no idea what to do. The others had to be on board by now, getting ready to come look for me. The divemaster, despite the lack of landmarks, knew where I’d surfaced. I’d gone in only one direction: that of the current. It couldn’t be so hard to find me. I kept the weights on, figuring that the closer I was to the boat, the easier I’d be to find.

  Then there was nothing to be done but to let myself drift with the current and conserve energy, my face away from the wind and the boat, surrounded by the limitless sea.

  Finally, I heard a reassuring sound. The boat’s engine fired up. I breathed a great sigh of relief, spun around, resumed my Olympian waving—and watched as the boat chugged into gear and set off in the opposite direction. Away from me, speeding into the horizon.

  * * *

  Now I was alone at sea, with nothing but water and sky in every direction. There was no one to wave to, nothing to swim toward. For the first time that morning, I thought, “People die this way.” I assumed that the current was sweeping me farther out to sea. I remembered that the Pacific Ocean is a rather large body of water; I remembered that there are sharks in it—most of them harmless, but some, aggressive. My bobbling little head seemed a small target for whoever might ultimately come out to search.

  Sometimes I felt scared stiff; sometimes I thought that I’d be fine so long as my BCD worked and I could simply float for a day or two. I’d never fully imagined drowning, and I wondered how long it would take and how painful it would be. I couldn’t bear the possibility of being unable to breathe, though I dimly remembered that some people who had been revived after nearly drowning had said the experience conferred a certain semifinal peace. I speculated how long the remaining air in my tank would keep me afloat. I was so tired; I wondered whether I would eventually fall asleep even floating in the sea.

  Then I heard the voices of my parents. I envisaged my father saying, “You took this risk so you could see exotic fish?” I could hear him suggesting that I try spending way too much time in aquariums instead. Not a cloud scuttled across the sky, and I imagined my mother, who had died twenty-five years earlier, chastising, “This is why you should always, always wear sunblock.”

  The waves seemed to be growing. If I drifted out beyond the reef, I’d be rolling in huge swells, and I wouldn’t keep my head above water for long.

  Sometimes I tried to swim again, just for something to do, and then gave up again.

  And no one came. And another twenty minutes passed. And forty minutes passed. And an hour passed.

  I felt sorry for John, who would be worrying on board. I envisioned John and Sue explaining to George what had happened. I thought about my daughter Blaine, who was in Texas with her mother, and I felt crestfallen that I might miss her growing up; I was so curious about who my children would become. I thought of Oliver and Lucy, our older children, who lived in Minneapolis with their two moms. I had accomplished much of what I’d always wanted from life: love, children, adventure, a meaningful career. I was grateful for the life I’d had, even if I wasn’t going to have much more of it. I thought that my disappearance might kill my father, and I regretted his pain. Mostly, I worried that my children might feel I had abandoned them, and I felt guilty about that—guilty and terribly sad. I wondered whether they would remember me.

  I mused, “These may be my last thoughts. I should be thinking something important.” But I couldn’t think of anything important to think. My mind drifted to Shakespeare and the great philosophers, but I didn’t have any new insights. I tried to get my life to flash before my eyes, but all that was flashing were the squinty prismatic colors caused by too much time in the sun on the sea. I considered my last words, even if no one was around to hear them. I couldn’t come up with anything profound or witty to say to the waves. I found myself dwelling on my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh story, “In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water,” when a frightened Piglet misses Pooh and thinks, “It’s so much more friendly with two.”

  I was glad that John was safe and that he would be able to care for George and Blaine, and I was sorry he wasn’t with me—both, at once. By that time, I’d been trying to stay afloat for about an hour and a half. I was sunburned to a crisp and felt a little feverish. I seemed to have swallowed gallons and gallons of seawater.

  I had never felt so alone.

  I remembered the literary trope that we all die alone, no matter how we die.

  I tried to enumerate what I had planned to do with and for my children. My own life wasn’t flashing before my eyes, but their lives were. I’ve never been good at the present moment, so I once more took refuge in planning an unplannable future.

  I felt my own insignificance; I felt the smallness of man. I felt how little it mattered, really, whether any one person lived or died.

  * * *

  My reverie was punctured by a voice on the wind—a voice that sounded eerily like John’s—shouting, “Help! Help!” I tried to shout back, but the wind still stymied me. Then I heard another voice. It dawned on me that the other three must be in the same situation I was. Because I was downwind, I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me. Judging by their voices, we were far from one another and from the boat. But perhaps the divemaster knew the answers I didn’t.

  On the horizon, I suddenly saw a boat, though I wasn’t sure it was our boat.

  Something that resembled a giant pink breast, perhaps five feet tall, came into view, heading toward the now clearly discernible boat. Perhaps the voices, the boat, and the breast were mere hallucinations. The boat, which was beginning to look clearly like our boat, moved toward the pink breast, and they appeared to merge. Then the boat headed in the direction from which the other voices had arisen. It stopped for a few minutes.

  And then it began to move toward me.

  Never in my life have I greeted any lover with the joy I felt when I grabbed the dive ladder. I climbed up shakily and collapsed into John’s arms.

  John had had a difficult experience, too, but quite different from mine. He was with two other people, one of them a divemaster, and they had surfaced about forty-five minutes after I did. They had faced the same dilemma of being unable to get the attention of the boat captain. They had taken turns trying to swim to the boat, but it always had motored elsewhere before they could reach it. Once, John got within about fifty feet of it. The pink breast was actually an emergency balloon the divemaster had been carrying. Later, I wondered how anyone who knew such a thing might be needed could have let a novice such as me return to the surface alone. The divemaster had inflated the balloon when she spotted the boat, then swum with it until the captain finally saw it and motored over to pick her up. Once on board, she had pointed the boat toward John and the aquarium girl. All the while they were stranded, John had assumed that I was already ba
ck on board; he became frantic when he learned that I was unaccounted for. But the divemaster had heard me trying to holler back to John and pointed the ship accordingly. I’d been afloat for nearly two hours and had drifted several miles.

  Only after I climbed aboard did I begin to get angry: at the boat captain, at the divemaster, at the hotel management. But I also felt so grateful to be alive, and it’s hard to be angry and profoundly grateful at the same time. I hugged John; I hugged the aquarium girl; I hugged the divemaster; I hugged the man from Maryland, slightly to his dismay. The boat captain tried to make cheery conversation, to which I replied in what John later described as my “Linda Blair voice,” a guttural growl like that of the demon-possessed little girl in The Exorcist.

  You actually can be grateful and angry at the same time.

  While I was adrift, thoughts of my children had occupied me. It’s not that I have such a high opinion of myself as a parent, but I do have a sense of my responsibility. Back on land, we decided not to tell George what had happened. I thought it would frighten him, as it was still frightening me. But while I was largely silent, he eagerly recounted his adventures of the morning—what he’d eaten for breakfast, where he and Sue had been digging, what washed-up shells and twigs he had found, and how far he’d swum all by himself. In the urgency of his speech, I found the complement to my mishap. I understood that the daredevilry of ordering eel for lunch or going skydiving or visiting war-torn lands pale in comparison to the adventurous domesticity of being a parent, which involves simultaneously reckoning with the vastness of the world and agreeing, at least for a little while, to be that vastness to one’s children.

  Acknowledgments

  When I set out to assemble this book, I suffered under the gross misapprehension that an anthology would involve merely scanning some things I wrote a long time ago and sending them to my publisher. In fact, the process has entailed selecting the articles; writing the introduction to the collection; composing prologues and epilogues; and endlessly polishing essays I’d already written, some of which had to be reworked. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that he didn’t want to repeat his innocence, but that he’d like to repeat the pleasure of losing it, and putting together an anthology of this kind provided a chance to grow out of my naïveté all over again.

  The trip down memory lane was a return not only to my bygone adventures but also to the editors with whom I’d worked on the original pieces. I have been fortunate both in being sent to fantastic places and in having my reports on them edited with exquisite care. I thank Nicholas Coleridge and Meredith Etherington-Smith at Harpers & Queen, who sent me out on my first big reporting trips, and believed in me before there was any apparent reason to do so. For their guidance at the New York Times Magazine, I thank Jack Rosenthal, Adam Moss, and Annette Grant, who helped me grow into myself and find an audience. At the New Republic, I was fortunate to work with David Shipley. In connection with my work for the New Yorker, I thank David Remnick, Henry Finder, Amy Davidson, and Sasha Weiss for their sterling care. As soon as she took over Travel + Leisure, Nancy Novogrod began sending me everywhere I’d always wanted to go; she gave me a bigger and better life than I would ever have had without her. Our decades of collaboration are among the bright spots of my professional and personal life. I also thank the editors with whom I worked at T+L, particularly Sheila Glaser and the wonderful Luke Barr. For her support at Food & Wine, I thank Dana Cowin; no one has ever had a better friend, and I’d gladly have given the world away in exchange for the joy her generous affection and steady wisdom have given me. I thank Catherine Burns and all her colleagues at the Moth for the steadfast good humor with which they helped me to craft stories.

  As always, I am deeply grateful to my glorious editor at Scribner, Nan Graham, whose trademark mix of loyalty, integrity, genius, and kindness has become an organizing force for my work and beyond my work. Also invaluable on the Scribner team are Brian Belfiglio and the divine Kate Lloyd, my beloved publicists; Daniel Loedel, whose calm patience protected me from stressful bureaucracy time and again; and dear, dear Roz Lippel, who publishes with such bighearted enthusiasm; also to the tireless Katie Rizzo, who filtered endless corrections with infinite patience. I am grateful to Steven Henry Boldt for his excellent copyediting, and to Eric Rayman for his careful legal read. At Chatto & Windus, I thank my entirely splendid editor, Clara Farmer, and her perfectly delightful deputy, Juliet Brooke. I thank David Solomon for the photo for the cover, Gh. Farouq Samim for the picture on the spine, Luca Trovato for the frontispiece photo, and Claire Jones for her work on digitizing these images. I thank Julia Mandeville for her help in conceptualizing the cover, and Jaya Miceli for the beautiful jacket design.

  My agent, Andrew Wylie, has been the guiding light of my career, and with each book, I appreciate anew how lucky I am to have him as my representative and friend. I am also grateful to the others at the Wylie Agency who have devoted themselves unstintingly to this work: Jeffrey Posternak, Sarah Chalfant, Charles Buchan, Percy Stubbs, and Alba Ziegler-Bailey.

  I am deeply indebted to Alice Truax, who does the equivalent of auto-body work on my writing, pounding every dented sentence to a high-gloss shine and replacing all the scratched and fogged glass of my arguments with breathtaking transparency. Kathleen Seidel has identified research errors and found the right answer to every query or uncertainty; she has combed through my prose with meticulous care and made it more lucid; she has organized footnotes, bibliography, website, and anything else that could possibly be organized. Writing is a crazy trapeze act, and she is my net. Thanks also to Jane McElhone for assistance on fact-checking.

  I wrote portions of this book at Yaddo, where I write faster and more clearly than anywhere else, and I am profoundly grateful for my time there. I am particularly indebted to Yaddo’s enchanting president, Elaina Richardson, who adds a patina of joy to each of those productive visits.

  I thank my colleagues at PEN, who have helped me to think more deeply about freedom and justice, in particular PEN’s remarkable executive director, Suzanne Nossel.

  I thank Bonnie Burnham, Henry Ng, and George McNeely at the World Monuments Fund, who have been invaluable advisers time and again on far-flung corners of the world.

  Christian Caryl has been something of a muse to me. He hosted me in Germany when I first began to write about Russia in the 1980s and the artists had started exhibiting in Berlin. I stayed with him when I went to Kazakhstan, and climbed mountains, both physical and ethnographic, in his company. I crashed with him and his family in Tokyo when he was living in Japan. He talked me into visiting Afghanistan when I was afraid to do so, and he made sure I had a place to stay and someone to guide me when I got there. Additionally, he read the manuscript of this book and provided invaluable feedback. Far and Away and my life would have looked very different without him.

  I thank the people who appear within these various stories, too many to list again here: all those who allowed me to observe or interview them. Some of the people who helped me where I went or helped get me there deserve special acknowledgment: Beezy Bailey, Sara Barbieri, Janet Benshoof, Eliot Bikales, Bonnie Burnham, Mario Canivello, Hans van Dijk, Ashur Etwebi, Susannah Fiennes, Fred Frumberg, Maria Gheorghiu, Philip Gourevitch, Guo Feng, David Hecht, Harold Holzer, Roger James, Cheryl Johnson, Susan Kane, Aung Kyawmyint, Francesca Dal Lago, Lee Yulin, Elvira Lupsa, I Gede Marsaja, Joan B. Mirviss, Freda Murck, Henry Ng, Brent Olson, I Gede Primantara, Michaela Raab, Emily K. Rafferty, Jack Richard, Ira Sachs, Hélène Saivet, João Salles, Gh. Farouq Samim, Gabriel Sayad, Andreas Schmid, Lisa Schmitz, Jill Schuker, Luiz Schwarcz, Julie Krasnow Streiker, Andrea Sunder-Plassmann, Corina Şuteu, Dina Temple-Raston, Farley Tobin, Ko Winters, and Mauricio Zacharias.

  I owe a debt also to my many companions in travel, among them Anne Applebaum, Jessica Beels, Chuck Burg, S. Talcott Camp, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Kathleen Gerard, Kathryn Greig, Han Feng, John Hart, Leslie Hawke, Cheryl Henson, Michael Lee, Sue Macartney-Snape, David Solomon, Claudia
Swan, and, always most of all, my beloved Alexandra K. Munroe, who has joined me on continent after continent.

  My thanks to Richard A. Friedman and Richard C. Friedman, who have kept me sane through experiences that often felt insane, and to Jon Walton for providing spiritual guidance when life seemed less than heavenly. Judy Gutow arranged the travel year in and year out, finding discounted fares and emergency hotel bookings in the most far-fetched destinations. I pay tribute to Danusia Trevino, who helps gracefully with so many thankless tasks and never grows impatient, and to Tatiana Martushev, who helped similarly in the earlier years of this project. Tremendous thanks to Celso, Miguela, and Olga Mancol, who have kept my household humming when I’ve been frantically writing and have coddled me when I’ve been too busy to coddle myself; to Sergio Avila, who gets me wherever I need to go; to Kylee Sallak and Ildikó Fülöp, who have brought both love and order to my son’s life and hence to mine.

  I thank my mother, who encouraged me to be adventurous. She has been dead a quarter century, but she read and commented on the earlier work in this collection. She always wanted my writing to be clear; she always wanted it to be kind. Returning to that early work has reminded me of how she influenced everything that has come since. My father has slowly come around to the idea that I head off to places where he would never go and wishes I wouldn’t go, either. He is still my first and most loyal reader, and has been there with arms outstretched whenever I’ve flown too close to the sun. My thanks also to my stepmother, Sarah Billinghurst Solomon, who has been an unflagging supporter of this project.