by Paul Theroux
I was salt-crusted and sunburned. No one noticed me beach my boat. I walked urgently, because I had hardly used my legs in two days. I bought an ice cream and a souvenir T-shirt and became part of the crowd. But I had the sense of having discovered Nantucket in my own way and, through dead reckoning, had discovered something in myself. That to me is the essence of the travel experience. Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. My particular way of getting to Nantucket—alone, almost blindly over water—seemed to transform the destination. The Nantucket I had arrived at was a different place from the Nantucket of the ferry passenger, and I was different, too—happier, for one thing. The trip had done what all trips ought to do. It had given me heart.
Paddling to Plymouth
A MAN FISHING is not easy to distract, but when this wading one saw me he lowered his tackle and called out, "This I've got to see!" It was a November day on the Cape and the surf was up. I was heading out of an inlet into cold three-foot dumpers in a kayak.
I was grateful to him for a remark that seemed to celebrate my departure. And I was pleased that he had noticed me, because in a vainglorious way I was proud of setting out on such a cold morning. I was also a little apprehensive: the turbulent aftereffects of Hurricane Kate were still in the air and on the sea. Because writers are mainly sedentary people, we have a tendency to overdramatize physical effort. The non-writers I know who are travelers take things pretty much in their stride and seldom make a meal of their adventures. The fisherman's attention made me self-conscious, and I took a formal sort of care in negotiating the waves, going up and over them and punching with my paddle. Then I was beyond the surf zone, bobbing along in relative safety.
This trip had not been a casual decision. A month before, I had spent some time in Southeast Asia. That had been a casual decision. But kayaking alone in a November sea off Cape Cod had required quite a lot of planning. I needed equipment and practice, I had to study the weather, and I had to overcome certain fears. I felt weak and ignorant, and I was afraid of tipping over in a cold sea and having to make what kayakers call a wet exit.
My fear of falling in was so great that the first chance I had, I decided to tip over my boat and throw myself into the sea—to break the suspense. I was wearing a wet suit, but even so, the shock of the cold seawater gave me a lasting headache. I was also worried by high waves. To prove to myself that I could maintain my balance in them, I went out one day and paddled in a sea that was producing four- and five-foot waves near shore. I had also been fearful of the cold, but I quickly discovered that in a seaworthy kayak one is almost impervious to it—in fact, perspiring and overheating are much greater problems.
As it was a week before Thanksgiving, I decided to paddle to Plymouth. I estimated that with detours it would be just about thirty miles. I was especially eager to get close to a blurred gray bluff on the off-Cape coast that I could see on clear days from my kitchen window. That was about fifteen miles away, and I had never been there. I liked the idea of visiting my view. After a month or more of practice and nerving myself for the trip, I set off, passing that slightly mocking fisherman at the inlet. Then I continued, staying just offshore and plunging up the coast, fighting a twenty-knot headwind. In The Survival of the Bark Canoe, John McPhee writes, "If the human race has one common denominator, it is hatred of a headwind."
The sea was scattered with whitecaps. Apart from the fisherman, there was no one else on the beach, and except for a distant ship there was nothing on the sea. I was alone and excited at the prospect of this unusual outing. It was like answering a dare. I was trying to prove something to myself, and I was enjoying the pleasure of having ignored dire warnings. Whenever I mentioned that I was going to spend the fall kayaking on the New England coast, people tried to put me off. Too cold, too windy, they said; too dangerous alone, and what about the sharks? I suppose people say those things because they don't want to be held responsible for another person's foolishness, and because they cannot imagine anyone doing something they would not do themselves.
The warnings filled me with resolve and seemed as hearty to me as a salutation. They made me think I was doing the right thing. The Cape in winter is bleak and unvisited, and yet it is less convincing as a backdrop for adventure than, say, Thailand. A person flies to Bangkok and returns with a pile of snapshots and a few yards of raw silk and believes that to be the very stuff of travel. Why am I not persuaded of it? Travel is supposed to be swimming pools and sunshine and the whole supine experience of feeling very rich because everyone else at the travel destination is colorfully poor. I don't condemn such travel as a vice, though I think it is helpful to recognize that there is an implied snobbery in this sort of vacationing. At its best it is harmless, but it is also thoroughly predictable. The adventure of travel is something else, something personal and enigmatic, and I usually associate it with risk. This might mean an assault on the north face of the Eiger, but it could also mean a rainy afternoon in Brooklyn or the choppy seas off Scusset Beach on Cape Cod.
Adventure may be deliberate. There are travel companies that organize trips—comfortable trips—to the North Pole and to Cape Horn. Yet adventure is more likely to be accidental. Classically it is the picnic that turns into an ordeal—the "Please, George, drop the keys!" of the Charles Addams cartoon (George aloft in the talons of an enormous bird); the hunting expedition that becomes a nightmare, served up in efforts such as Deliverance; the jolly, away-from-it-all sea voyage interrupted by killer whales, retold in Survive the Savage Sea; or that other favorite reversal of fortune, about the man and wife who stay afloat for months in a rubber dinghy, before the inevitable Korean freighter sights their last flare.
Circumstances are everything. In the summer, tiny tots thrash around in inner tubes on the sunny sea off Sagamore, but in winter no one goes very close to the water for fear the waves will rise up and snatch them away. The winter wind is northwesterly, cold and hard and blowing directly from Plymouth. Sailing in a small open boat is impossible in such seas; rowing is out of the question; even large yachts are in dry dock for the winter. Next year, people say, and stuff their hands deeper into their pockets as they go on surveying the wild sea from shore—the breakers and dumpers, the hurrying whitecaps and the clash of clapotis, the flying spray, and the claw-shaped overhanging wave crests that look like something out of Hokusai.
November had dripped into my soul. My remedy for that gloom lay in battling through the surf from my house in East Sandwich across the bay and around the corner to Plymouth. The season made it difficult and therefore rewarding. Half the thrill of it was that I had never done it before. I also liked the idea that I would be alone, that the trip involved maps and calculations, consultation, and a degree of secrecy. In spite of planning, the unexpected usually occurs. True travel is launching oneself into the unknown. There is no excuse for it except that one offers oneself in a spirit of experiment.
Yet paddling a kayak off the New England coast, even in winter, is not very strange. Sea kayaking, which has been carried on by the icebound natives of Alaska and western Greenland, has caught on as sport and recreation in recent years. This little craft has allowed people to travel to places that were unreachable in any other boat. A kayak can go almost anywhere in practically any weather. In the right hands it is probably the most adaptable and seaworthy vessel afloat. Kayaks have been paddled across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean and up the Alaskan coast and down the Nile and the Amazon. In 1979 Charles Porter of Maine rowed his Klepper kayak around Cape Horn—incidentally making him the first man to go around the Horn facing backward.
There have been paddlers in kayaks at the Horn for almost as long as there have been humans. When Darwin first saw the boats, he was scornful. He concluded that the kayak proved that the people in them were savages. These Indians were no better
than animals, he said, because they had not improved on their craft. "The canoe," he wrote in 1837, "their most ingenious work, poor as it is, has remained the same as we know from Drake, for the last two hundred and fifty years." Darwin was mistaken in his conclusion, though. Four hundred years later the kayak is still unchanged in its basic design, because for its size it is as near as possible to being the perfect boat.
That first day I paddled to the east end of Cape Cod Canal. This wonderful trench, first proposed by early settlers in the seventeenth century and finally opened in 1914, passes from Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay. When I crossed the eastern entrance, a strong current was running out of it, because the tide was rising—the canal current floods east and ebbs west. With both the wind and the tide against me, I was pushed a distance offshore and had to paddle hard to get back near land, out of the wind. Farther on, I had lunch at Sagamore, under a cliff. There, a dog walker told me he had seen a shark nearby that morning.
"Its dorsal fin was about this size," he said, measuring two feet with his mittens. "And it wasn't flopped over, so I know it wasn't a sunfish. Must have been ten, twelve foot long."
Soon after that, night fell. It came quickly, like a shade being yanked at four o'clock, and then there was nothing I could do but put in.
I did not see any sharks the next day, but I saw hundreds of eiders, grebes, canvasbacks, and goldeneyes. And cormorants gathered on rocks, looking as if they were posing for German medallions as they held their wings up emblematically to dry. The beach had an empty, scoured look, bleak and curiously lifeless, in great contrast to the waves just offshore and the foamy corrugations on the horizon. At times I could not see over the tops of waves when I paddled in troughs between them.
Eventually I was close to the cliffs that I saw from my kitchen window —the long eroded headland near Center Hill Point. The waves broke over my bow, and now and then over my head, streaming over my spray deck. I did not tip over, and I stopped worrying about it. It was heavy going in such a strong wind, but I was in no particular hurry. I knew that my destination was merely my excuse to take the trip.
If I needed any justification, I had it on the third day. Paddling in a shallow rocky bay near a place the chart said was Churchill's Landing, I saw half a dozen dancing boat moorings—or were they lobster trap markers? The buoyant lumps began to disappear. Then some returned, bobbing; then there were ten. Soon I saw that these shmoo heads were unmistakably seals. They came closer and surrounded me, and I counted seventeen of them. They were funny, friendly, and nimble, their whiskers dripping, their smooth heads gleaming like enchanted beach toys. Their upthrust and swiveling heads made me laugh out loud, and I was delighted when they followed me to Manomet Point.
Seeing those harbor seals and creeping up on them and being followed was worth my month of preparation and all this effort. That vision of rollicking seals stayed with me and gave me zest for the next leg into Plymouth.
It was not much of a distance, but the trouble was that as soon as I rounded the point I received the full, unimpeded blast of the northwest wind. I was off White Horse Beach and struggling through the surf. I reminded myself that I was not in a hurry. When I was younger, I headed for unusual places by conventional means. This time I had chosen an unusual means of getting to a familiar place.
To avoid the breakers smashing on Rocky Point, I detoured into Plymouth Bay and headed for the harbor breakwater. Here I was sheltered by the high ground of the mainland, and with the wind deflected I paddled into Plymouth. If I had come in a car, I probably would have driven through without stopping. But because I had come in a kayak, I was grateful for this safe arrival and this pleasant landfall. I visited the Rock and then toured the Mayflower II, on which people dressed as Pilgrims explained their ship and the colony with effective mimicry in the accents of mythical Mummerset. A man dressed as the ship's master described the rough passage; Mrs. Brewster was there to expound her husband's theology. In Plymouth proper, someone dressed as a chicken stood by the roadside gesturing to a sign that said, ORDER YOUR TURKEYS FOR THANKSGIVING.
I went into the post office to send a postcard. I was wearing sunglasses and a splashed wet suit and rubber booties. I had paddling mitts called pogies on my hands. I was windblown and on my suit were rimy stripes of sea salt. In a secret self-dramatizing way, I felt like Ishmael.
The woman at the counter sized me up and said, "Where have you been?"
I said, Out there, paddling a kayak.
"What are you doing that for, a coffee commercial?"
Fever Chart: Parasites I Have Known
IN MANY COUNTRIES you remember your meals, while in other—and I think more interesting—places you remember your illnesses. High on my chart of unforgettable afflictions is dengue fever, also known as break-bone fever, which is endemic throughout most of the tropical world. I first came across dengue during Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico in 1963—it was common on the island. But I was not bitten. Nor was I bitten in Africa over the next five years. But in 1969, in Singapore, the attractive woman who lived next door came down with a severe case of dengue. One hot night a few days later I fell ill, actually collapsed—my knees buckled, my temperature shot up to 103, my nerves burned in my skin, and I felt paralytic. Very soon I exhibited other symptoms: my hair began falling out, my joints ached, I became depressed, and for several days sobbed uncontrollably. And I hallucinated, extravagantly fantasizing that the mosquito that had bitten the voluptuous woman next door had also bitten me—two feverish people, one mosquito.
The expression "virtual sex" was not in my vocabulary then, but my head was full of metaphysical poetry (I taught English literature), which amounts to the same thing—John Donne is the poet of virtual sex, particularly in "The Flea."
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be...
This was precisely my dengue conceit, and it has a scientific basis. As an arbovirus infection, dengue requires only humans and mosquitoes to cast its pall. The same mosquito had visited the woman and me.
Illness is nearly always dramatic in imaginative literature. Look at Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" or Camus's The Plague or Greene's A Burnt-out Case; so much of fiction is a fever chart. But illness is tedious in a travel book. When I wrote about my dengue fever, it was in a short story of the same name (in The Consul's File). I am proud of the fact that in six lengthy travel books I have never recorded a single instance of having diarrhea. This is not delicacy on my part, and my stomach is as susceptible as anyone else's, but who wants to read about it? A great feeling of accomplishment can be derived from overcoming illness abroad, but no sensible reader of a travel book wants to hear the gory details of your amoebic dysentery, or bout of malaria, or resident chigger.
This reminds me that on leave from Africa in the 1960s, I went to a family doctor in south London and told him that I suspected I had a chigger living under my toenail. "You Americans," he said. (We are the world over perceived as hypochondriacs and alarmists.) But I swore it was so, and when he dug the horrible squirming maggot out from under my toenail, he made a face, as though he had gouged an extraterrestrial from my body, and had the grace to say, "Blimey."
The principal difference between fleas and flies are wings. Fleas are wingless; they leap from victim to victim on strong hind legs. Flies fly. The "tumbu fly" referred to in handbooks about tropical diseases is known in central Africa as a "putzi fly" (putzi means "maggot" in the Chichewa language). But maggot infestation, or myasis, would be a painful nuisance by any name. Using evasive action, I had succeeded in avoiding putzi flies for almost two years, until I happened to take a trip upcountry. It was October, known in that region as "the suicide month," for its intense heat.
All I lacked on this trip was Corporal Jika Chikwawa, lately of the King's African Rifles, who normally did my washing and ironing. On
e day upcountry I washed a shirt and hung it out to dry. Putzi flies laid eggs on the shirt. When I wore it again, the warmth of my body hatched the eggs, from which maggots emerged and burrowed into my skin. A day or two later I had boils all over my shoulders and back. At first I had no idea what this hideous outbreak was, and then I popped one of the boils and a maggot wiggled out. My body ached with forty-odd more, nearly all of them out of my reach. I owe it to my friend "Malawi Bob" Maccani for staying up one hot night in 1965 and holding a match over each boil until the maggot squirmed, then squeezing the thing out. We did not know that a less disgusting method is to spread oil over the boil (and the maggot's breathing apparatus), forcing the creature to crawl out of your body for air. Reflecting on this later, I was reminded of the disease that overwhelms the main character in Edmund Lucas White's little-known horror story "Lukundoo" (an African explorer breaks out in boils that contain tiny black men), and used this putzi fly episode to good effect in my World's End short story "White Lies."
In Malawi, I had no personal experience of the African eye worm, though my students knew it. The strangest aspect of this filarial infection (caused by a fly bite) is that one day the victim sees the worm crawling across the surface of his or her eye and he knows he is afflicted. How can the traveler prevent this happening? Avoid the lovely and inviting shaded forest pools where the large chrysops flies breed and bite. Don't swim in Africa, is a good general rule. If you do, the chances are excellent that you will emerge from Lake Victoria—or Lake Edward, Lake Albert, the Congo River, or your local swimming hole—with bilharzia (schistosomiasis). And the cure—big needles in the gut—is more painful than the illness. Except for splashing in the waves at Mombasa, I never seriously swam in Africa.