Praise for Narrow Dog to Carcassonne
“A smart comic telling of an adventurous undertaking by man, wife, and their narrow dog, Jim (a whippet)… Darlington has a barge full of opinions…and dares to voice them as energetically as he dared to make this trip… [and] to the end maintains what is no façade but an enviable, raucous joy of living.”
—Boston Globe
“The style echoes the author's clear zest for living in the moment. Frequent flashes of wit and poetic prose capture poignant emotions.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hilarious…engaging and intelligent…Adding dimension to the experience are countless references to lines of music, literature, movies, etc., familiar to Darlington (and most readers), gleaned over the course of a lifetime in the 20th century.…Figuring out the sometimes obscure references becomes a game embedded in the reading.”
—Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star
“Destined to become a travel classic.”
—Observer (UK)
“A richly atmospheric journey… The writing is as muscular and lean as its canine hero, conjuring up dawn mist or giant catfish in prose haiku before moving on to the next killer one-liner…. A rich and winning comic debut, destined to become a classic.”
—Sunday Telegraph (UK)
“Boat enthusiasts will appreciate the insider terminology about locks and dock life.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Hilariously, brilliantly written… Sheer joy in every sentence…You don't want the journey, and thus the book, to come to an end.”
—FetchDog.com
“Dry Brit wit and often poetic descriptions power the quirky memoir.”
—National Geographic Traveler
“If you want to read about a real dog adventure, check out Narrow Dog to Carcassonne.”
—Dayton Daily News
“Written with the author's glorious sense of humor, this is one of those journeys you never want to end.”
—Good Book Guide (UK)
TERRY DARLINGTON was brought up in Pembroke Dock, Wales. He moved to Staffordshire, where he founded Research Associates, an international market research firm, and Stone Master Marathoners, a running club. Like many Welshmen, he is talkative and confiding, ill at ease with practical matters, and known to linger in pubs. He likes boating but doesn't know much about it.
MONICA DARLINGTON's father was a gardener and her mother a housemaid, or perhaps it was the other way around. She was beauty queen of Brecon and Radnor, Wales, has a first-class degree in French, has run thirty marathons, and leaps tall buildings in a single bound. She quite likes boating.
Brynula Great Expectations (JIM) is sprung from a long line of dogs with ridiculous names. Jim can run at forty miles an hour. He is cowardly, thieving, and disrespectful, and he hates boating.
Visit their website at www.narrowdog.com.
To
Lucy and Richard
Clifford and Katherine
Georgia and Mark
with our love
I've come on Floridas you won't believe–
Arthur Rimbaud, ‘The Drunken Boat’
1 Their Gods Are Not Our Gods: Staffordshire
2 The Ice Storm: Virginia
3 Stand and Deliver: Virginia
4 The Village of the Damned: Virginia
5 The Terrible Sounds: North Carolina
6 Why Am I So Cold?: North Carolina
7 Sea of Grass: North Carolina
8 It's Called Being Friendly: South Carolina
9 Even in Arcadia: South Carolina
10 Raining All Over the World: Georgia
11 Treasure Island: Georgia
12 I've Come on Floridas You Won't Believe: Florida267
13 Look for Me There: Florida
Dropping Out, or How It All Began
Quotations, References, Echoes
Permissions
THEIR GODS ARE
NOT OUR GODS
Staffordshire
The Limey Queen of Greenwich Village — Covered Thinly with Maple Syrup — The Marine Terminal — A Thread of Silver — Captain Rob — The Wayfaring Stranger — Their Gods Are Not Our Gods — Farewell Party — Mum and Dad — Summerstreet Lane — The Small Green Ones with the Spotted Bellies — Pork Cracklins — Mantovani — Jesus Ears — Derek and the Alligators
THE TROUBLE WITH YOU IS YOU ARE OBSESSED with the USA, said Monica. The GIs gave you too much gum in the war and you read too many comics and saw too many films—too much Captain Marvel, too much Tarzan, too much Terry and the Pirates, too much Alan Ladd. But America will crush you like it always has. Remember after the New York Marathon, when that gay fireman went off with you over his shoulder? If I hadn't come along you would be Tits Magee now, the Limey Queen of Greenwich Village.
I was in a bit of a state, I said. He was trying to help—he was very nice.
What about when you opened an office on Madison Avenue and lost us a fortune twice? Now you want to sail down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. It is eleven hundred miles long. There are sea crossings bigger than the English Channel. There are flies. There are alligators. There are winds that blow at two hundred miles an hour. Ten thousand people drowned in Galveston and look what happened to New Orleans. And you want to sail down it in a canal boat six feet ten inches wide.
There's no such thing as a wind of two hundred miles an hour, I said—the air would catch fire. And Galveston and New Orleans are somewhere else—they are on the Gulf of Mexico.
But that's where you want us to go, isn't it? A narrowboat on the Gulf of Mexico, and you have conquered the US or died in the attempt. And Jim has to die with us. You and me are seventy; we've had our lives, but Jim's only five. He knows you are going boating again—the way he looks at us and shivers. This isn't the Trent and Mersey Canal, it's not the Thames at Henley, it's not the Rhône—this is a bloody wilderness, halfway round the world.
You could stay at home, I said.
You would never come back. Your bloated corpse will be found in some deserted bayou, half eaten by alligators, with three times the permitted alcohol level.
We'll go over and do a recce—check out both ends of the journey: Virginia and Florida. Trust me—I would never do anything to upset my Mon. Slightest problem, we'll stay at home.
How about rednecks and bikers, are they a slightest problem? How about gun nuts and gangsters? How about snakes and poison ivy and rip tides? How about hip-hop and preachers on the radio for a year? How about you have always buggered it up in America and now you are going to do it again? I knew there was something funny about you from the start—just because you went to Oxford and liked poetry I thought you were OK. In fact you are a bloody lunatic, and I don't know what I ever saw in you.
It was my pilgrim soul, I said, and my commanding presence, and my wild, careless laugh.
I could have married that Frenchman, said Monica. He looked like Yves Montand.
• • •
HALFWAY UP THE EAST COAST OF THE USA, Chesapeake Bay reaches a hundred miles towards Washington.
At the mouth of Chesapeake Bay you turn south into the Elizabeth River. On the left is Norfolk, and on the right, Portsmouth. From our hotel room over Norfolk we looked down the river, a quarter of a mile wide. The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway begins here, and follows the river for seven miles, and then sets out across the Great Dismal Swamp. We didn't know much about the Great Dismal Swamp, but we were not sure we liked the sound of it.
Over the river a US Navy aircraft carrier, and nearer to us a ferry crawling between the two cities; wood and rails, its false paddle-wheel turning. The sun came up quicker than in Stone, and the river went to flame then deepest blue.
There were seventeen breakfasts in the hotel, and lots of African-American waitresses who said y'all all the time. We knew most of the breakfasts, except for the biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were scones, and the gravy was a salty white sauce. There were funny little sausages and hills of crispy bacon. So that's what happened, I said, to the crispy bacon we used to have before the war.
If you stood at the buffet an African-American gentleman would cook you a waffle, and you could have sauce made from fake cherries, or syrup made from fake maples.
We'll get fat, said Monica. And we are already fat after sailing through France.
No doubt, I said, but what can you do? The North American continent is blessed with the riches of nature, and covered thinly with maple syrup.
• • •
DAVE, THE OPERATIONS MANAGER OF ATLANTIC Containers at Portsmouth Marine Terminal, was a nice man with a beard. So that's a narrowboat, he said, looking at a photograph of the Phyllis May. Never seen one before—my God she's thin.
Most of the canal boats in England are like this, I said—the locks on the main system are only seven feet wide. The original barges were seventy feet long, ten feet longer than the Phyllis May. They were pulled by horses. The boating families lived in the little cabin at the back. It was a culture of its own and it died out when the railways and lorries took over. Then in the nineteen fifties people started making narrowboats out of steel as leisure boats.
How much does she weigh?
Seventeen tons. Ten-millimetre flat bottom: paving stones for ballast. Draws two feet—on a wet day you can sail her up Stafford High Street.
What's she like to steer?
You stand on that counter at the stern, and hold the tiller behind your back. She has no bow thrusters but I can do most of what I want if there are no big waves or winds or currents.
There are big waves and winds and currents on the Intracoastal, said Dave.
He took us round the terminal. Containers in piles, and machines a hundred feet high with two legs that pick up the containers between their knees and roar about and put them down somewhere else. Yachts on trolleys, and lorries and helicopters and tanks, waiting for the fifty-thousand-ton roll-on roll-off container ship that will carry them off around the world.
This is your crane, said Dave—the little one. We call him Clyde. He's only two hundred feet high. I guess you will want to be on your boat when we drop her in.
Yes, said Monica, he will, and Jim and I will stay on the wharf.
I tried to take a photo of Clyde but I couldn't get far enough away.
Dave introduced us to the ladies in the Portsmouth Marine Terminal office. We can't wait to meet Jim, said Nice Amy. We have eleven dogs between five of us. Tell Jim that we will have several bags of pork skins waiting when y'all arrive—are they the same as pork scratchings?
In June, I said, Jim will give us an opinion.
DOWN THE INTRACOASTAL WATERWAY AT thirty thousand feet. A thread of silver across the Great Dismal Swamp, which looked like the weather map on the telly when it's raining. Then sunlight on Albemarle Sound, and on Pamlico Sound, both wider than the English Channel. Along North Carolina the chalk line of Atlantic surf, and just inland the silver thread welling into lagoons and swamps and meanders. In South Carolina, past Charleston, and then through Georgia, the coastline is a madman's jigsaw, and it doesn't get much better in Florida. Now Lake Okeechobee is on our right, misty blue to the horizon, and the Everglades draining in endless patterns to the south.
We turn along Alligator Alley, the motorway across the peninsula, hold to the fast lane, and glide into the long slow afternoon of western Florida.
AT THE MARINA IN FORT MYERS THE MILLION-dollar plastic cruisers Tarpon and Gulfstream Rose lay quietly depreciating. From the rail an egret looked at us with a lemon eye, and trod its spotted foot, hustling for a sandwich. (An egret is a sort of heron, or perhaps it is the other way round.) A lizard trickled between our shoes, changing colour as it went. Four pelicans in the sky, and beyond them a vulture, its turkey head peering for corpses.
In America you pass examinations and then you can be a captain. Captain Rob was a nice man without a beard: fully denimed, blue-eyed, wiry. I would not like to be a fish on the other end of the line from Captain Rob.
You hit Albemarle Sound in North Carolina as soon as you have crossed the Great Dismal Swamp, said Captain Rob. Albemarle Sound is the estuary of the Chowan, and the Pasquotank, and the Alligator Rivers. You have got to cross it to get into the Alligator River on the other side. It is very wide. You are out of sight of land. First time I went over, the wind came round against the current and the waves were six feet high. I turned back, and I was lucky to get in. Pamlico Sound and the Neuse River are no better. But you've got nearly a year—y'all wait for a good day. There is big commercial stuff, so keep out of the way when that comes along. And the powerboats can turn you over—some of the people who drive those are crazy. But you shouldn't get squashed in a lock chamber because there are almost no locks. You are connected to the sea all down the coast.
We went down a canal connected to the sea in France, said Monica—the Rhône à Sète in the Camargue. It kept trying to wash us into the Mediterranean.
Is it going to be very hot? I asked.
Anywhere up the Waterway it can be over a hundred and absolute humidity. The heat could kill you—with you being so old. And watch for the flies. There is a green one—if you knock it off it attacks you again. Then there are the no-see-ums—they burrow into your skin. They are so small you no-see-um.
I got some lotion from the Avon Lady, I said. It's the one the fishermen use against the clegs, the Scottish horseflies. I put some on and as I walked by our kitchen door the varnish peeled off.
Bring some for me, said Captain Rob.
What about the manatees? I asked, don't they get up to three thousand pounds?
Yes, but they are all right unless they lean on you.
What about the vultures, asked Monica, and the alligators?
The turkey buzzards won't attack you until you are nearly dead. People worry about the alligators of course, but they come out in the dark and you can see their eyes shining round the boat before they start to climb in. Have you got a steel front door?
No, said Monica.
There is a new arrival these days, said Captain Rob. It's a monitor lizard seven feet long. They run at thirty-nine miles an hour. They eat dogs.
Jim can do forty, I said.
I guess he'll have the edge then, given a fair run. The hurricanes can be a problem. They are mainly in the summer and the autumn, but last year Wilma didn't come until the middle of October. Sometimes they don't reach the Carolinas and Georgia. But sometimes they do, so they could catch you on the way down.
What happens then?
Hell and destruction. Get the boat out on to the bank and head for the high ground.
What else is there to stop us?
There are the panthers and the bears and the anacondas, and the Red Tide. We don't like to talk about the Red Tide. But even if you sink, or get ill and die—with you being so old—you will have been the first English narrowboat on the US waterways. If you make it to Florida I will pilot you on to the Gulf of Mexico. I'll lead you out in my charter boat or come on the back of your funny boat with you. There will definitely be no fee—it will be my pleasure to help in this grand endeavour.
WE WENT TO IDA'S BON APPITEATERY ON FIRST Street, Fort Myers, to celebrate the end of our research trip. I am not slow to the bar but a thin grey-haired man got there first. I was once a wayfaring stranger myself, he said, and no traveller from overseas buys his first drink while I am around. I have seen sorrow, toil and danger, he added, everywhere I go.
Look, I said, you can't do that—all right I'll have one of those beers that smell of barbecue smoke—a Samuel Adams—and cheers.
And I'll have a gin and dry martini, said Monica, and thank you very much. The barmaid filled a half-pint glass with ice and held
it low. Then she took a gin bottle with a spout and held it over her head and emptied it into the glass. She looked at the glass and frowned and opened another bottle, and added another two inches from that. Then she took an aerosol of dry martini and squirted it in the direction of the glass.
I am going outside to shout at the cars, said the Wayfaring Stranger. It's all right—I know most of them. He went outside and sat down at a table and started shouting at the cars.
I turned to the man on the next stool. Would you be an American gentleman? We just love your crazy accent.
My name is Michael, said the gentleman, and I am a fireman. I was born here, and so were my parents and my grandparents but I am an Irishman of purest blood—I observe St Patrick's Day and drink little but Guinness. Empty your glasses at once so I can refill them. What is your name?
They call me Tits Magee, I said, and this is my girl, Gulfstream Rose.
It took more than one sailor to change my name to Gulfstream Rose, explained Monica.
Michael said that our hotel was in one of the older areas of the town and it was dark and we could get murdered so he would walk us back. The barmaid put a lid on Monica's drink so she could take it home for breakfast. On the way out we tried to buy a beer for the Wayfaring Stranger, but he was shouting at the cars.
There was no one around. From what we had seen of the southern USA there was never anyone around. No one in Norfolk, Virginia, day or night, and no one in Fort Myers, Florida. Just empty streets and the smell of barbecue smoke. We knew that American citizens were to be found in the shopping malls at certain times, and in bars. Where they were the rest of the time we did not discover.
Goodbye Michael—so many thanks. We'll be back.
Goodbye Tits and goodbye Gulfstream—y'all have a great trip now.
IT LOOKS LIKE THE PHYLLIS MAY COULD GET down the Intracoastal with a bit of luck, I said next morning over the biscuits and gravy, if we can avoid the hurricanes. We have got June to the following spring—we have to average only an hour's cruising a day. We can choose our weather for the big crossings. We can have some lovely long stops; get to know the towns and cities, where there are any. But what bothers me is that we are not really close in with the culture here. Going down to Carcassonne was dodgy enough at times. And in France the weather is more like ours, the countryside is more like ours, the towns are more like ours. The French are Europeans like us—realistic, cautious, tired. However much you like the US, their people are not our people and their gods are not our gods. You know what they were like when we opened our office in New York—Oh of course you will sell a lot of research reports and make a lot of money, no problem. They have long antennae—they pick up on what you want to hear. They might agree to one of my ideas about boating and we could be sent to our deaths out of politeness. Or something really American could get us that we didn't expect—like a raft of lumber or a water moccasin snake or a venomous hummingbird that kills with a peck. Or we might say the wrong thing about Vietnam or Guantánamo or Jim Reeves or the Civil War and someone will shoot us. They are very excitable, and they all have guns.
Narrow Dog to Indian River Page 1