Standing in the square, it felt like we were living a page right out the book.
My mother was a travel writer for our local paper back home, and this wasn’t the first time I’d been dragged along on one of her crazy international escapades. As a ten-year-old I’d been smuggled into a nightclub in the Bahamas while she interviewed Peanuts Taylor, the famous bongo drummer, for an article about the maiden voyage of Carnival’s first cruise ship, “the Mardi Gras” (although the real story was that shortly after pulling away from the dock, the ship ran aground on a sandbar just outside the Port of Miami). I’d been with her to Haiti, where we visited the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince and learned about Vodou symbolism in the colorful paintings. And when I was twelve, I accompanied her to Cartagena, Colombia, where we toured a plantation that made “vitamins” from coca leaves.
Now it was the 1970s, and Alex Haley’s miniseries Roots had turned everyone into amateur genealogists.
“We will go to the old country,” she declared, “and find our Sicilian roots.” She pitched the story to her editor, and off we went in search of—as she put it—“our Italian Kunta Kinte.”
“Mi scusi,” she said, trying to ask one of the men if he knew the location of the Rizza family farm outside of town. He refused to talk to her, and the women uniformly glared at us. For once, my mother’s reporter charm wasn’t getting us very far. It seemed we were up against a deeply ingrained suspicion of strangers and might not possess the linguistic skills to bridge the gap. Finally, a woman came out of a bakery and looked at the documents we held. As she drew a crude map and gave it to my mother, I felt like the whole town was watching.
“Should we stay here for lunch?” my mother asked.
“Are you kidding? Let’s get going before they shoot us or something.” I was half expecting a black sedan to come screeching around the corner and start firing bullets into the square.
She rolled her eyes and we got back in the car.
The directions led us out of town down several miles of un-maintained roads, past acres of cactus and then olive trees. After about twenty minutes, the road petered out, and my mother stopped the car in front of a modest stone farmhouse. She knocked on the door, clutching the yellowed family photos and the map. A slender young man about nineteen opened the door, and my mother thrust the documents into his face as if he were a customs agent.
“We’re here from America!” she shouted.
He immediately shut the door. A minute later, a much older man in a threadbare undershirt who looked like he’d just woken from a nap emerged from the house along with a woman wearing rubber gloves and an apron splotched with red stains. They looked like Italian hillbillies, the Ma and Pa Kettle of Sicily, only more frightening. I imagined dueling banjos playing the theme from Deliverance in the background. For a few anxious moments we all just stared at each other. Then my mother pointed out the house in the photo she held. Aside from the trees, which had grown considerably, the house was relatively unchanged. That clinched the deal.
We were ushered into the house and despite our unexpected arrival, put up for the next three days. Their son was banished to the couch, “Ma and Pa” took his room, and we were given their bedroom.
Although my mother knew some Italian, the relatives spoke only in Sicilian dialect. I sat by silently as they struggled to communicate with each other, feeling as if I was watching a foreign film without subtitles. When we arrived, “Ma” had been in the middle of roasting and canning tomatoes, and the house smelled sweet and savory. I couldn’t understand her words, but I could interpret that rich wonderful scent in any language.
I still remember the food we ate that weekend. In addition to being a travel writer, my mother also wrote a weekly food column, so I grew up eating what would have been considered exotic at the time—borscht, tagines and curries. Our family dinners were often results of research for her food column, straight out of the test kitchen and onto our plates. Admittedly, the majority of the tests proved unsuccessful.
But here, there was pasta with sardines, fennel, and pine nuts; fried eggplant with ricotta and basil; and arancini, the deep-fried rice balls stuffed with tomato ragu, ground beef, mozzarella, and peas—exactly the way my grandmother made them. There was wine drawn from a big glass jug that looked like an office water cooler, and I had my very first taste of grappa.
On Saturday morning I helped Ma finish putting up the tomatoes and later, in the fading afternoon light, we gathered lemons and she showed us how to make limoncello. My mother shadowed Ma in the kitchen and took careful notes, thrilled that our trip would yield not just a travel story, but a few food articles too.
On Sunday we all drove to town for Mass at the crumbling church off the square where we’d asked for directions. Just days before we were outsiders—strangers—but now we were celebrities. Famiglia! From America!
After Mass I walked in the olive groves with the son. He showed me how they spread out nets to gather the olives, and in broken English asked if he could “scratch my beautiful hair.” I figured he meant touch, not scratch, but my mother and Ma were following close behind, leaving us little opportunity for further cultural exchange under the olive trees.
On the day of our departure, we stood outside the stone house, loaded down with jars of blood orange marmalade, tomato sauce, and bottles of olive oil. As a teenager, it was my job to be sullen and maintain an air of detached boredom, but as we hugged goodbye, my carefully constructed posture of aloofness began to crumble. Their hospitality had pierced me, and I was close to tears.
My mother started writing her “Roots” article immediately after we returned home, but it took two weeks before the film from her camera was developed and we could share our photos with my uncle. When the prints arrived, my uncle studied them carefully. He reached the last one, then slowly flipped though them again.
“Mary,” he finally said to my mother, “Who are these people?”
“That’s Maria and her husband and son.”
“Who?”
“Cousin Maria!”
“This is not Maria,” he said, shaking his head.
“But this is the house,” said my mother. “Don’t you recognize it?”
“I remember this house, I played there as a boy. But our house was farther down the road, past a creek.”
The color drained out of my mother’s face. Had we stayed with complete strangers? As she tried to recall the exact conversation with “Cousin Maria” at the door, she realized we’d never really exchanged names. Ma and Pa called each other Mario and Mama, and since she never revealed her real name, we called her Mama too. We’d just been swept up into their home and their lives, no questions asked. Our status as blood relatives was based solely on a dog-eared photo.
I found all of this completely hilarious, but my mother was horrified that the roots she thought were hers belonged to some other tree. We later discovered that cousin Maria and her family had moved to Catania twelve years earlier. Even if we had found the “right” house, our real relatives would have been long gone.
Thirty years later, when my mother was in her seventies, we returned to Sicily to connect with our genuine blood relations in Catania. This time, we were veramente la famiglia. True family. Once again we were plied with copious amounts of food and drink, and once again we were given the master bedroom. The experience varied little from our first trip.
Maybe I hadn’t been so far off, learning about Sicily by reading the Godfather. If only I’d paid more attention to the plot, I would have realized it was actually a story about the enduring bonds of family—regardless of whether you were related by blood. If you presented yourself as loyal to the family, you were accepted as family. Our first trip to Sicily was evidence of that. This time we were connected by blood, but I would always be connected to Ma and Pa by love.
Marcy Gordon’s narrative travel writing has appeared online for World Hum and in many Travelers’ Tales anthologies including More Sand in My Bra, 30 Days in Italy a
nd The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 and 2010. She is the editor of Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana: Funny Travel Stories from the Road (Travelers’ Tales, 2012). She also writes Come for the Wine, a popular blog that features wine tourism destinations around the world. Visit www.comeforthewine.com for more information.
MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
Of Monarchs and Men in Michoacán
Would you give up sex to live (almost) forever?
They live forever by not having sex. That’s one theory. By forever, I mean they live eight times longer than either their parents or their offspring—which would be about 6,400 human years. By they, I mean the generation of monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, that emerges from chrysalides in the late summer and early fall across eastern North America. Scientists speculate that they discovered the fountain of butterfly youth by somehow delaying their sexual onset. It is called diapause. Although most monarchs live about thirty days, this generation lives eight months, traveling south to slumber chastely though a Mexican winter before heading north again in the spring. It is only in those last few weeks of their life that they sexually mature. Then they mate, and die, while their short-lived young flutter a bit farther north, and so on.
I must have learned about these monarch Methuselahs and their epic migration in third grade but I’d forgotten, and this lesson—half in Spanish, accompanied by drawings on the back of a coaster in a New York City bar, surrounded by handsome men—is much more intriguing. I’m with the adventurers of Papalotzin, most from Mexico, one from Europe, another an American expat. Papalotzin is the name of their ultralight painted with the orange and black markings of the monarch butterfly, and they are in the process of flying the machine (which is not much more than a hang glider with a giant propeller in the back, currently stashed in a hangar in New Jersey) between Montreal and Michoacán, Mexico. They’re raising awareness about threats to the monarch butterfly.
The photographer of the group is named Luis, and he is like a radiant light and I am like a moth. He speaks little English. My Spanish returns. He is Oaxacan, tall of stature and broad of shoulder. A great big smile that pulls his dark eyes down at the corners seems to be his steady state, and I’m hypnotized by the easy laugh and the intense interest he shows as we muddle through conversations. There is a kindness about him that reaches out to everyone around him. He seems an innocent flirt with the world. He tells me he is at home on a skateboard or behind a camera. Or, I imagine, in a woman’s embrace. I show the Papalotzin crew the city as lunch turns into dinner turns into drinks. They are travelers and need a place to stay, their group disbanding to various locations. My place is close. Luis’s body is both heavy and light against mine that night, and I yield.
I will not live forever.
Papalotzin means royal butterfly in Nauhuatl, the language of the Aztecs who once inhabited what is now Michoacán, in central-western Mexico. Their scattered descendants still remain, as does their belief that monarchs are the souls of the dead. Every year the butterflies come to the tiny patch of trees that their great-great-great grandparents left the prior spring. How they get there is a mystery. Maybe light. Maybe magnetism.
They travel three thousand miles in a matter of weeks.
They weigh less than a gram.
Do I go to see him or the monarchs when I travel to Mexico City three months later? Can I say both? It’s early December, and I have missed the monarchs’ arrival. Someday, someday, I will return to Mexico on November 2nd for Day of the Dead. Someday I will be there when the monarchs descend to Michoacán en masse, souls aloft and arriving, draining from every place where milkweed grows east of the Rockies. Do you think it is a coincidence that Día de los Muertos falls within days of the American Halloween, our holiday of skulls and cemeteries? Do you think it is random that the colors of our Día de Candy are orange and black, the colors of the monarch? I do not.
Ancient dead souls or flying insects, today’s butterflies now live in our modern world. We mow down the milkweed the caterpillars feed upon so we can build houses. Genetically modify the plants from which the butterflies draw their nectar. Cut down the last bits of Michoacán’s pine forests, a Goldilocks land neither too hot nor too cold that this magical long-lived generation returns to, year after year. In the last quarter century, monarchs have lost half of their overwintering grounds.
The photographer and I head west out of Mexico City to see the monarch reserves, but first we must fly. Valle de Bravo is Mexico’s Tahoe, a playground of forested mountains surrounding a huge lake. The weather is ideal, the town quaint and quiet absent the influx of tourists. Families gather at the old stone church, where great white calla lilies overflow from the altar. The church bells ring, a resounding “uh-oh,” down the cobblestone streets lined with pink bougainvillea, scaring the roosting pigeons, flowing past the fruit vendors, the firecracker vendors, the church tchotchke vendors selling plastic Jesuses. Rising up into the blue sky where paragliders float down on colorful swaths of fabric. By afternoon, we join them in the skies. He and I leap off a mountaintop, me strapped like a baby in front of him as we sail down softly to the lake’s edge, legs swinging in the air. In the evening we fly in Papalotzin, thousands of feet above the lake, our high-flying monarch, the air thin and chilling as the sun descends.
We go to great lengths to fly. The monarchs just spread their wings to let the sun warm them and take off.
Michoacán kindles my longings for man and land. We speak only in Spanish, and he is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. He has none of the hard edges of my ex. Luis is light, the result of an upbringing in a loving comfortable family but with the freedom given only to an adored youngest child. He wandered and played. Explored and adventured. He skateboarded competitively and photographed intimately. Troubles came to him as they did to all, but their blows seemed glancing. There is an ex-wife somewhere and two children he speaks of swooningly, yet happiness still dominates, even as he describes the pain of not seeing them nearly enough. Always, always, the default is the enchanting smile.
He’s different, but the earth is familiar. Michoacán’s flora is a living replication of the Pacific Northwest, where I once lived. The monarch’s preferred habitat is the oyamel tree, a short-needled evergreen that dominates like the Douglas fir. The ocote Montezuma tree is a long-needled echo of the Ponderosa pine. The understory is thick with replicas of maple, manzanita, and rhododendron. I am at home.
The next morning is cold, with hints of frost on the ground, when Luis and I leave for El Rosario, home of the Special Biosphere Reserve of the Monarch Butterfly. Pablo Angeles, a forester for the World Wildlife Fund, meets our bus in a fire-engine-red Volkswagen bug. He’s in his forties, with a thick moustache and eyebrows that are black and long, his hair neatly combed back.
Butterflies, yes, but first, tacos. A man named Salvador serves us meat from a lamb he killed the day before. Each day, another animal, two on the weekends he tells us, is buried in a pit with hot rocks and the leaves of the maguey cactus to slow cook as he sleeps. Now, he asks our preference—legs, back, balls—and lifts up steaming wet cactus leaves to find the right body part, which is thrown on the thick section of wood that is his cutting board. He chops it fine with a large cleaver, but it’s so tender it falls apart under the blade, and a woman behind him wordlessly hands him a hot tortilla off a grill. Salvador pressures Luis into having the specialty of balls, tossing a glance at me. Luis reluctantly accepts the mushy meat. We bathe the tacos in salsa—red and green—cilantro, onions, and fresh-squeezed lime. He shows us the skull of the animal.
Satiated, we climb back into the bug and head to El Rosario.
Pablo’s hands hold a steady ten and two o’clock on the wheel as the bug putters up the mountain, sliding around switchbacks that open up to expansive views of the cultivated fields and pueblocitos cradled amidst forested hills. A man tosses a white chicken into the air as he stands atop a stack of hay. Girls with jet-black hair plaited in long braids walk to school, past roadside alta
rs covered with flowers and candles. We pass stands of poinsettias, piñatas, pottery. We pass police with large guns and blue uniforms. More images of monarchs start appearing, stenciled on walls, accompanying business signs, on the sides of taxis. Pablo has spent his entire life here and laughs about the 1976 “discovery” by Americans of the monarch’s winter home.
At 10,200 feet above sea level, we arrive, emerging from the car and entering the reserve. We leave behind the people, the tourists, the women cooking tortillas on smoky wood-burning stoves. We leave behind the children, watchful and covered with dust. One by one, monarchs fill the air.
Within minutes, there’s an opening in the forest where a path cuts through, a mini flyway with thousands of monarchs drifting down the passageway, from ground level to the treetops fifty feet above. We have entered a church, a holy place, and we fall silent. Pablo encourages us to keep moving; there’s more, higher up, he gestures. But every turn in the path reveals more, and we keep stopping, each vantage a new shot for our cameras. Butterflies are covering the benches set up for visitors, lining the handrails, filling the tree branches and trunks. Their flight sounds like the falling of the gentlest of rains.
The path divides, the right fork clearly cordoned off, directing traffic to the left. Pablo hesitates for a moment before lifting the rope and with his WWF credentials, we walk up the path that leads to the right, into the heart of the butterfly grounds. Wings and monarch bodies litter the ground. Pablo picks one up and cups it in his hands, blowing hot breath onto it. He watches it closely, but there is no sign of life, and he tosses it gently off the path. Another hundred feet on, we cross another rope and gasp as we gaze up into the trees.
The Best Women's Travel Writing Page 11