The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  The story about the tower was as provocative and unsettling as the deathbed poem. Who was this guy? He had rolled boulders, some weighing as much as 400 pounds, several hundred yards uphill, through coastal scrub, and then had set each one by hand—alone. This only confirmed my suspicions that the man was obsessive and unpredictable if not outright stubborn. But he had somehow gotten under my skin. I decided to stop in Carmel to visit Tor House on my way home, to see this mad man’s tower, and to try to unravel the Jeffers riddle that kept resurfacing.

  Our small tour group was still huddled around Jeffers’ bed as if gathered to say our final goodbyes while the docent recited the deathbed poem. It was a sober moment for everyone. I looked out through the sea-window with its simple curtains and wooden window seat, across the gray-green mat of garden sprinkled with drifts of May flowers, to the gun metal surf churning in the distance. It was a stormy day and dark clouds were furrowed along the horizon. I wondered what had gone through Jeffers’ mind as he lay dying, his head turned toward the window, gazing at a similar scene. Was there a sense of resignation? Regret? Fear? Or was the sight of hawks circling and pelicans diving for fish in the white foam a comfort to him, an affirmation that the natural rhythms of life overlap each other like the waves of the incoming tide? Rather than a morbid fixation, perhaps the deathbed was Jeffers’ attempt to take some control over his own, inevitable fate.

  What I had expected to be an ordinary tour had become something more profound. As we filed into the living room, a latent energy seemed to linger in the house, as if the family had gone out for a walk together and, at any minute, the two boys would come bursting in through the door with a dog at their heels. This sensation was due, in part, to the way our docent had made the home come alive for us. He told stories about each room that portrayed the fierce love affair between Jeffers and his wife Una and of a family life that was often insular but very closely knit. The docent had recited Jeffers’ poems in such a heartfelt manner at different places around the property that it was almost as if the poet himself was speaking and pointing out his favorite places—the cornerstone of the house, keepsakes from travels embedded in the walls of the house and the garden, and stones that had been carved with words or quotes, then placed along the garden path.

  If the house seemed infused with the warmth of family life, the world outside, at least on this day, was more typical of Jeffers’ flinty demeanor. I zipped up my jacket and cinched the hood tightly around my face as we crossed the small yard. It was perfect weather, I thought, to visit the tower that loomed in front of us.

  Hawk Tower was an odd structure, simultaneously squat and gangly. Una had long admired the medieval towers found throughout Ireland, and Jeffers had tried to replicate the style. But the structure in front of me looked nothing like those I had seen in Ireland, other than ruins where the ramparts had either been breached or severely ravaged by time.

  There were two ways to move about within the structure—the wider, external staircase, or the interior, “secret” passageway that Jeffers had built for his sons. We were warned that the passageway was dark and extremely narrow in places and the steps, unusually steep. I chose the passageway because Jeffers often used it himself, and I had a hunch the other members of my group would take the stairs. I would be alone with Jeffers and the dark, cold stone.

  Old but still strong I climb the stone, . . .

  Climb the steep rough steps alone.

  I climbed past the first landing that served as a play area for the two boys and up to Una’s stronghold. Over a small fireplace in the corner, Jeffers had carved a wooden mantle with a line of Latin from Virgil that roughly translated to “lovers fashion their own dreams.” It seemed to describe Tor House so precisely. The stone buildings, the keepsakes everywhere, the wildness of their surroundings—the Jeffers had carefully created a world, a dream, solely for themselves. If the outside world chose to drop in for dinner or otherwise share that dream momentarily, so be it. Robin and Una required only each other’s company and the promontory overlooking the ocean; the rest of the world could be damned.

  I continued up to the outside parapet at the top of the tower, carefully navigating the steep, wet steps and pulling myself up by the hefty anchor chain that served as a handrail. The wind had picked up and gusts of rain stung my face the higher I climbed. I turned southward and scanned the jagged coast, the tree-lined shore that stretched into the distance and wrapped around the bay to join Point Lobos.

  White-maned, wide-throated, the heavy-shouldered children of the wind leap at the sea-cliff.

  I imagined Jeffers standing in this very spot in a squall, pensive and content as he took in the surrounding natural world that, at the time, laid claim to Carmel Point. Up on this perch, he would become hawklike—calm, watchful, and uncomplicated, comforted by the elements and the power of wind and ocean.

  Jeffers may have built the tower for Una, but it was more than a simple material gift he had given her. It was himself—his blustery spirit, his wild-god heart embodied in granite, each stone placed as carefully as the words he arranged upon a page. As I gazed into the horizon and considered this thought, my hands atop the coarse, damp stone Jeffers had placed there with his own two hands, he no longer seemed a mystery to me. He was neither dark nor self-absorbed as I had first judged him to be. He was this tower, strong and resolute, incorporating all that surrounded him into its surface and protecting all that was dear to him within. I needed to hear his words within these walls, feel the wind and rain against my skin as he had, and view the world from his tower before I could grasp the essence of the man.

  Keith Skinner is a writer and photographer living in Berkeley, California. His travel articles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Most recently, “Inside the Tower” received an honorable mention in New Millennium Writings’ nonfiction contest. Keith is currently working on a historical novel about the nineteenth-century Mendocino Coast.

  HANNAH SHELDON-DEAN

  Notes into Lines

  After all, music is the universal language.

  In the middle of the St. Charles Bridge on a warm day in Prague, we wait with our binders of music, wondering if anyone will bother to show up. There are five or six of us here now, out of perhaps twenty-five. We’ve been singing all week, and this is our day off; we wouldn’t blame the rest of our friends for not coming. The tourists take pictures of the statue above us, and the jazz combo carries on down the way. You wouldn’t blame the tourists, either, if they didn’t want to pay attention to us, but we’re hoping they will.

  In New York, I practice my choir music at home alone between rehearsals, coaxing my brain through a process that still feels alien, even after two years. Because I didn’t learn to sight-read music when I was younger, I’m still learning now. It’s the difference between knowing a language well enough to translate it in your head and knowing that same language well enough to understand the words’ meaning with immediacy, without translation. There are so many words, each with significance, and multiple meanings.

  In front of my keyboard on the floor of my apartment, I stitch the notes together slowly, learning every line as if it were a melody, even though it usually isn’t. Sometimes, it’s like trying to tie a knot using only one hand. By the time rehearsal comes around on Sunday evening, I’ve woven the lines into my brain, so that they’re waiting for me when I open my folder full of sheet music. It’s a joy every time, to stand among the other altos and hear myself singing the same thing that they are, proof that I’ve done my work well. It’s a way of immediate understanding that doesn’t come along often, in my experience. Even better is later, when I can turn my attention away from what I am doing and toward what we are doing together as a choir, a much more elaborate form of breathed pattern-making. It’s an exhilarating thing, hours and hours of practice spread between twenty-something singers, condensed into a few minutes of rare cohesion.

  Our first audience in the Czech Republic was an auditorium full of school ch
ildren. Little kids, maybe ages six to twelve. Our repertoire for the weeklong tour is heavy stuff—lots of dissonance, lots of minor keys, lots of songs that stretch beyond the five-minute mark. Anxious about holding the kids’ attention, our conductor cut the program short, down to about an hour. The school was quiet as we made our way to the stage, fighting off last night’s jet lag.

  In New York, we beg all around town to get attendees at our concerts. We’ve sung with some great musicians at some great venues, but when it comes time to fill the pews at our home field, the Shrine of St. Anthony of Padua, it’s never as many as we hope. Our own friends and family make excuses more often than not, but I don’t hold it against them. It’s hard to know what to make of us, a gang of young, pretty, secular people singing old, strange, sacred music in a giant stone church. Sometimes it’s new music, actually, but it all tends to sound foreign to pop-tuned ears. It sounded that way to me before I joined, and the mystery was part of what drew me to it. If there’s a place in the United States where audiences might bother to seek us out, you’d think it would be New York, but as it happens, they generally don’t. The ones that do come applaud politely and tell us afterward that the concert was beautiful—that’s what friends are for.

  In the auditorium at the school in the Czech Republic, the children looked just like American children, like there could be whispering and giggling hiding right beneath their polite surface. Then we began to sing, and the children stayed quiet. They did not squirm in their seats. They knew when to applaud, and they kept their eyes on us for the entire hour. We glanced at each other in awe between songs: Where did we find an audience like this?

  When our translator asked them, at the end of the concert, if they had any questions for us, hands went up all around the auditorium. How often do you practice? Is it hard to learn so many songs? What’s that thing you hold up next to your ear at the beginning of each song? When our conductor passed his tuning fork out into the crowd, the children rippled toward it in a murmuring wave, as if he’d brought them candy. And when their teacher asked who’d like to perform for the visitors, a gang of kids appeared on the stage almost instantly, singing folk music by heart.

  When we left, they followed us out to our bus, asking for autographs. One little girl drew a picture of a bear and gave it to our conductor, with the words For your teem written underneath.

  New York, everybody knows, is a mecca of culture, a land of opportunity for the artistically minded. But New York had nothing on the Czech towns we visited. At the end of our second concert, a tearful teenage music student presented us with flowers and an angel figurine and thanked us for one of the best nights of her life. The next night, the entire population of a town in the countryside came to see us sing, and afterward, the mayor invited us over to his office for drinks. “These cakes,” said the mayor’s gangly young translator, gesturing to the silver trays of pastries on the table in front of us, “were made for you by my mother!” Not to be outdone, the mayor informed us that he loved to sing and usually did so publically only once a year, at the town’s annual cheese festival. “But tonight,” the translator told us, “he makes an exception for you!” The staff pressed more slivovitz on us, as the portly mayor launched into an aria.

  Don’t they realize? I thought of myself alone in my apartment, building my notes into lines.

  The next city we visited, Karvina, was like a life-sized toy; everywhere we went, stores and restaurants seemed nearly abandoned, and around each corner we’d find ourselves running into each other and no one else. Even on a prominent billboard in the city’s central square, there we were, looking back at ourselves out of an oversized black and white print of our group photo. But that night at the church, there was everyone who hadn’t been wandering around the city earlier, listening, applauding, caring that we were there.

  I had a nagging feeling that we were cheating them: Listen, I wanted to say, in New York, we’re nobody. But there was something else: we sounded beautiful. We were singing as perfectly as we’d ever sung. Later, back in New York, we found a point in one concert recording where every woman in the group sang a single glissando, a sliding note, in exact unison. We replayed it three or four times to make sure, because how could that be? How could so many of us have become a single voice?

  Our final concert was the biggest, the reason we had come on the tour in the first place. We were one act of an opera festival honoring Czech composer Bedrich Smetana in his home city of Litomysl. As a choral group, we weren’t sure we’d interest many opera fans—and they didn’t know who we were, we hadn’t begged them to come, we hadn’t been marketing ourselves; this wasn’t New York.

  There were hundreds of people there, filling the interstices of our largest Czech venue.

  These are my favorite moments: when my voice fits so snugly with the others that I’m no longer sure I’m singing. I can feel the sound, but barely hear it. At the end of the back row of altos, I was so close to the front row of the audience that I felt sure, at first, that they must be scrutinizing me, noticing each breath and snag in my voice. By the end of the concert, I was certain that they could not; I was barely there, anyway.

  We finished the encore for this last concert and left the church, back out onto the cobblestones outside, heading for the vestry where our New York skins were waiting for us.

  “Come back—you have to come back! We’re going back inside.”

  We stumbled back on the slippery stones, to the sanctuary where the audience was still on its feet. We were happy and unprepared; when had anyone ever demanded a second encore of us? We sang a pretty Spanish song, straightforward and cheerful, one we’d learned for Christmas shows and for anytime we needed to sound like we knew what we were doing.

  To my mind there were two options: We had fooled them, or else New York had fooled us.

  That evening, we sat outside at a Cuban-themed bar where they stopped serving drinks at eleven. Along the wall behind our table, there was a wooden support beam just a few feet higher than the backs of the metal chairs. I climbed up onto it and sat there with my knee leaning against my boyfriend’s shoulder, swinging my other foot and drinking a minty cocktail that cost me the equivalent of about two U.S. dollars. I’m happiest, always, sitting just a ways apart from others, looking at things from an angle that no one else can see.

  “Guys,” I said. “In New York, someone would have told me to get down from here by now.”

  Just then, a Czech woman hurried over to us, looking like maybe she worked at the bar. I braced myself, ready to apologize, to get down and sit in a chair like a civilized person.

  “I don’t speak English,” she said, in English. “But—sexy girl!”

  “Thank you!” I said, and meant it, while my boyfriend smiled. In New York, we might have been offended.

  That was last night, before we left for a final day in Prague before the trip’s end. Here on the St. Charles Bridge, we know we’ve had our moment; this, now, is just for fun, and to see if we can get the tourists to toss us enough koruna to buy a single round of insanely cheap beer. It’s 5:30, the appointed time. If it’s just six of us, that’s O.K.; none of these people know our name, and there’s no pressure to do well.

  It’s Sunday, and the bridge is packed with crowds in both directions. Unlike the other cities we’ve been in this week, it’s easy to lose each other here. But then Garrett appears, and Carah, and there’s Justin. Steph, Lindsay, Alyssa. Audrey and her husband Gordon, and even Adam, who said earlier that he was tired of singing and wouldn’t come. One by one and a few at a time, we all materialize, as if required to do so. We fan into an arch, and place a straw hat in the middle with a handful of change inside.

  By the third measure—just seconds into the song—a crowd has gathered, curious and eager. We have only a few binders of music to go around; we’re peering over each other’s shoulders and laughing when we miss entrances and sing the wrong notes. We’re a mess compared to the rest of our performances this week, but the crow
d just gets bigger. An hour passes and we run out of material, and no one hesitates to start the entire set over again. As we sing through our opening song a third and final time, a man in the front row of the crowd stands with eyes closed and spine straight, choosing our voices over a stunning view of an entire city.

  When we pick through the hat later, there is Czech money, Euros, Turkish money, American money, and even a single British pound. At one point, a family from Minnesota comes over to talk to us between songs, and when we tell them we’re from New York, they say, “You’re doing our country proud!”

  Nothing will be different when we return to New York. It’s not as if the mayor’s translator’s mother is going to tell all her friends to pack the pews at St. Anthony’s next time we have a concert. We’ll never see those schoolchildren again, or that family from Minnesota, and we won’t put their words on our website. To New York, we’ll appear just the same as ever. But New York to us, or to me anyway, will look different; I’ll understand, I hope, that it has edges, and that it ends. That despite what it says to us with its winking skyscrapers and infinite currency, New York is not the world.

  As I sit alone in my apartment in Brooklyn, stitching and unstitching, I am someone, and if I forget myself as I hope I can, there is every chance that some other one may close his eyes and choose to listen, and women I’ve never met may bake cakes with me in mind.

  Hannah Sheldon-Dean is a generalist to the core, and splits her time between freelance writing and her studies in the master’s program at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work.