An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  We continue stalking until we finally see a bonefish about 70 feet away, nose down and tail sticking out of the water, grubbing for food. That’s too far for an accurate cast, so we edge closer. The hunt demands patience. One false step and the bonefish will split as quickly as the manta ray. I need to put the Yucatan special directly in front of it, but a strong gust grabs my line and whips it to the left of the target, where the fly hits the water with a deadly splash.

  So long, bonefish.

  Other fish soon turn up, but the wind is giving me fits and tying knots in my line. Chris nudges a sea cucumber with his toe and lifts up another conch, tickling it from its shell.

  “Hardly anybody catches a bonefish first time out,” he offers kindly, aware that I’m about to prove him right, but for once I don’t mind being skunked. It’s enough to be standing where I am, while the sun sinks behind the clouds and fills the sky with rosy light.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, I’m sitting at a picnic table under a big tamarind tree, looking out over Fulladoza Bay. With me is Teresa Tallevast, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist, who has been studying Culebra’s marine life for 13 years. She works at a lovely compound near an aged desalinization plant that supplies the island’s potable water. The plant resembles something assembled hastily, a batch of mismatched machinery held together with bailing wire and positive thinking.

  This was the site of the first settlement on Culebra, but when the U.S. Navy arrived, shortly after Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States in 1898, the officers in command drove the natives down to the harbor and named the new town in honor of Admiral Dewey. Most Culebrans refuse to speak Dewey’s name, though. Instead, they refer to the town simply as “Pueblo.” Islanders have long memories.

  I mention how tranquil the island feels, but Teresa warns me that’s deceptive. In fact, there’s a real estate boom going on. Much of the unimproved land across the bay has been subdivided into five-acre parcels and sold to off-island speculators. Sooner or later, they’ll build houses and possibly resorts. Only the shortage of wood and other construction materials keep the market from exploding.

  Even with development contained, the island has been deforested over the years (in part because the navy used it for gunnery and bombing practice from the outbreak of World War II until 1975), and Teresa has recorded the impact on the environment. She cites the fishing bat as evidence. It’s as large as a crow and feeds on fish. The bat has no major predators, but its numbers are declining. It needs old-growth trees to roost in, and those trees have been cut down.

  The health of Culebra’s coral reefs is also in jeopardy. When the island’s vegetation is removed, the topsoil washes down to the sea. The mangroves’ shallow roots are supposed to trap the sediment, but the mangroves are also disappearing. They topple over in storms, and the locals clear them away to put up a shack or build a dock.

  So the sediment is carried out to the reefs. The water becomes turbid, and less sunlight penetrates it, affecting—even covering—the coral, which requires plenty of sunlight to survive. The lack of sun affects the sea grass beds, too. The grasses turn brown, then wither and die. It doesn’t take much to upset the fragile ecosystem and destroy a natural balance. The reefs on Culebra may someday be as damaged as most other reefs in the region.

  “The system can handle a certain amount of sediment,” Teresa says, “but once we go beyond that capacity, the habitat inevitably declines.”

  * * *

  On Saturday afternoon, Dewey—or Pueblo—turns into a miniature carnival on wheels. People are hanging out on street corners and drinking beer at a speedier pace than normal. At Rosa’s Bar, Jaime the bartender dispenses cold brews through an open window. Jaime lived in Brooklyn for seven years, but he came back to the island a New York Yankees fan.

  “Who’ll be the Puerto Rican champs this winter?” I ask, since baseball’s season is about to begin.

  “Maybe San Juan,” Jaime replies, although not with enough confidence to send me searching for a bookie.

  Hotel Puerto Rico is jammed with patrons, too. The bartender here plays a jaunty tune on his harmonica, one eye closed, his lungs pumping. He’s transported. A police van circles the streets, but the cops only smile and chat. Probably they’ve got their own party to attend as soon as they’re off duty.

  I buy a Medalla at Romero’s liquor store by the ferry dock. Romero has a heart tattooed on his right bicep. His three children were born on the mainland at a Fajardo hospital, he says, and he regrets it. There’s a general feeling in town that something unique—a distinct Culebran identity—is slipping away as time passes and the future rushes in with all its changes, wanted and unwanted.

  The ferry pulls into the harbor again, and I see more booty being unloaded—a spool of telephone cable, a wicker armchair, a table, some lumber.

  “The Kmart ruined Fajardo,” Romero sighs. “The small businesses can’t compete.”

  I move on to Hart’s Oasis, where the front door boasts a gaudy painting of a flamingo. Here the bartender has an actual TV at his command, and he’s watching a World Wrestling Federation jamboree. Hart’s may be a real sports bar someday, he brags. At a grocery store next door, the owner has posted a page torn from a tabloid. HEAVEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY HUBBEL TELESCOPE, the headline screams.

  * * *

  Sunday morning breaks with a familiar wash of sunshine, but Dewey is quiet now, its revelers still sleeping off their excesses. Culebrans are regrouping, preparing to return to ordinary life on Monday. Every church is packed. A preacher’s voice rises at Jerusalem Methodist, where a little girl in a print dress, her hair in braids, darts from her pew full of mischief and escapes into a house across the way. Below the bridge over Laguna Lobina, the orange corals grow.

  There is one last beach to visit before I leave. Soldado is hot and deserted, and the sand stings my feet. The sea is its usual elegant turquoise. I float on my back for a while, then put on scuba gear and chase some yellowtail snappers. What splendid isolation! It would be nice to preserve Culebra just as it is, beyond the grasp of developers and all those changes the future will bring. But that’s not likely to happen.

  Later I board the same rickety prop plane with the tattered seats. The engine kicks in with a roar, and we climb up from the airstrip and soar over the water. It seems to me then, as Culebra disappears, that my time on the island has the quality of a dream. Did I really stand on a marl plain and almost collide with a manta ray? The dream is a rich one, and I’ll remember it pleasantly in the days to come.

  Islands, 1998

  Cavagnaro’s Bar & Grill: East Hampton

  In the summer of 1980—the summer I adopted Cavagnaro’s Bar & Grill as my local—I rented a house in the woods of East Hampton as a form of therapy. I hoped to recover the social skills I’d lost while writing my first book in near total isolation, in a dilapidated trailer in the Northern California wine country, where my only regular visitor was a seventy-five-year-old fishing buddy. Jack and I played cribbage for a nickel a point and drank Brown Derby beer with shots of Old Overholt back. I don’t recall either of us mentioning books or literature.

  All that would change in East Hampton, I assumed. With so many authors around, I’d be able to catch up on the literary shoptalk I’d been missing. I imagined long, boozy evenings discussing the latest controversy in the New York Review of Books, at the same taverns where James Jones and Truman Capote used to hold forth. I had just one contact in town, an old friend married to a columnist at Time, but she turned out to be very well connected and invited me to a Saturday-morning softball game for writers. Perfect, I thought, exactly what I had in mind—a lazy summer devoted to idle pursuits.

  A lot of writers showed up that Saturday, some quite famous. I realized with chagrin I’d never read any of their books. They produced thick nonfiction blockbusters and plot-driven novels destined for the movies. Maybe the trick wasn’t to live cheaply in a trailer and pray a publisher would like what you wrote. It might be
better to come up with a marketable idea and sell it for a big advance before you’d put a single word on paper. Deals had probably been cut right there at second base. The scales were falling from my eyes.

  The Time guy was the official scorekeeper and kept elaborate statistics. If you needed to know what Carl Bernstein batted last season, he could tell you. He rigged the game according to seniority. The writers who’d been around the longest—years in some cases—always got to play, but newcomers like me usually rode the pines even if they’d been (also like me) a high school hotshot. Everyone took the softball seriously, too, and they didn’t bother with drinks afterward. Instead, they behaved as they did in Manhattan and rushed off to their next engagement. Clearly, I’d been deluded about the literary shoptalk.

  Even if nobody else craved a postgame beer, I did and stopped at Cavagnaro’s on the outskirts of town. It occupied the ground floor of an ordinary three-story brick building. I’d driven past it several times, but I’d never noticed any activity and wondered if it was still in business. When I peeked inside, the answer appeared to be no. The place was empty except for a short, stocky man of seventy or so sitting at the far end of the bar reading the Daily News.

  He did not glance up from the paper when I entered. Instead, he buried his nose more deeply in it, determined to ignore me. That was Al Cavagnaro, who’d been on duty since 1951. His father had opened a restaurant and deli on the site in 1923. Al and his wife still lived in quarters behind the bar, and he cooked when he was in the mood to cook, which wasn’t every day.

  In spite of the chilly welcome, I climbed onto a stool. Cavagnaro’s was a relic of the 1950s, a classic Italian joint with Sinatra on the box and red sauce in the kitchen. I tapped my fingers until Al finally rose from his seat with an audible groan and tossed a coaster in front of me. “What’re you having?” he asked warily, then brought me the beer I ordered and returned to his paper. That was fine with me. I felt comfortable in the quiet room with its the worn wood and vintage appointments. The bar offered a pleasant refuge from the glitzy nonsense of the Hamptons.

  Al was a true Bonacker, I recognized—crusty, flinty, someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly. The name derives from Accabonac Harbor, where the baymen and fishermen ply their trade. Most Bonackers regard the summer people with dismay or worse, as I should’ve guessed from Al’s cold shoulder, but I respected him for not caring if he made a buck off the tourists. “See you later,” I called as I left. Al spoke not a word.

  When I came back the next day, he was watering the shrubbery out front. “You want another beer?” he asked. I nodded. “Okay, I’ll open up,” he muttered, handing me the keys to unlock the door. By such fits and starts, we lurched toward a conversation. After six visits, Al asked where I was from, and after my eighth, what I did for a living. He’d never had many writers as regulars, he told me, but the painters from Springs, like Jackson Pollock, used to drop in on occasion. “He’d pull up in his coupe with a babe on his arm”—not Lee Krasner, I gathered—“and hit the whiskey,” Al confided.

  Al didn’t drink himself, but he had a terrible sweet tooth. He wasn’t supposed to indulge it because the doctors had put him on a strict diet—they were treating him for bladder cancer—and his wife made sure he stuck to it. But he’d devised a strategy to get around her. Whenever she went out, he’d sneak into the deli next door for a pint of ice cream, then melt it in his microwave and slurp it down as fast as he could before she could catch him at it.

  The bar was seldom crowded in the early evening. Most customers were Bonackers off the boats or in from the potato fields, still in their work clothes. They sold me freshly dug clams and taught me how to surf cast for bluefish. If they were hungry, Al might grill a burger for them, but he couldn’t stand to cook all the time. He’d make lunch on Tuesday and be closed on Wednesday. I don’t remember a menu. Once he boasted that he’d fixed prime rib, and I was sorry I hadn’t ordered it when I saw the huge slab of juicy pink beef he served.

  So Cavagnaro’s became part of my summer routine. I’d write at home, then visit Al most days. If things had gone well at my desk, I’d celebrate with a bourbon or two, but more often I felt I deserved no better than a Beck’s or a Heineken—microbrews and IPAs were not yet on tap in that distant, deprived era. Sometimes I sat at a table to read a book, and other times I joined in the ongoing conversation about the farms and the sea. Four months flew by, and my lease ran out and I got ready to move to London at the end of September.

  Al’s face fell when I informed him. He looked genuinely wounded, and I was surprised. I’d never seen him show any emotion before. He saw the makings of a Bonacker in me, apparently, and couldn’t believe I’d decided to leave instead of settling down. It was as if I’d refused an OBE or declined some other honor. He bought me drinks and insisted on feeding me a platter of homemade sausages, worried I’d risk starvation in faraway Europe.

  “You’re one of a kind,” he said, patting me on the back. That was a high compliment to pay a summer person, and I was grateful for it. He wanted a photo of us together behind the bar and enlisted a slightly tipsy customer to snap the picture. I still have it somewhere in storage. I’m holding up a glass of beer as though for a toast, and Al’s smiling broadly. I sent him a postcard from London and later heard he’d beat his cancer and lived on into his eighties—still a curmudgeon, no doubt, and much admired by all who knew him.

  Narrative, 2014

  A London Village: Islington

  To arrive in London on a rainy autumn morning, straight from Heathrow on the express train to Paddington, is to find yourself transported into a canvas by Magritte. There I was, wheeling my new suitcase to a modest b&b, accompanied by travelers from France, Germany, Japan, and most other countries of the world, all wheeling their suitcases to modest b&bs. We should have been wearing bowlers, really, and floating a few feet off the ground.

  Only when I stepped into the Dalton Arms and lost the crowd did I know for certain that I was in England. The desk clerk was reassuringly called Clive, the lobby walls bore framed portraits of various royals, and I was promised a hearty breakfast of bacon, baked beans, grilled tomato, toast, marmalade, and one egg. I didn’t dare ask for two eggs, for fear I’d upset a subtle cultural balance that had been in play since the signing of the Magna Carta.

  An old saw has it that London is a city of villages. I was returning for a longish stay in what I think of as my village, the Borough of Islington, north of the Thames. When I first lived there 20 years ago, in a fourth-floor walk-up on Myddleton Square without any central heating, it was considered a marginal and even unattractive place by many people, since it had no major museums, attractions, or high-end restaurants.

  The look of it put off some visitors, too—largely Georgian with a few Victorian touches, featuring row upon row of nearly identical blocks of flats, all built of drab and weathered brick. Islington was left-leaning, as well, and sexually tolerant and racially mixed, with lots of subsidized housing for low-income families. In other words, it amounted to a Tory nightmare, but to a San Franciscan, it felt like home.

  Islington is no longer undiscovered. Myddleton Square has become an “address,” where the price of flats is beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. On blocks that once were a jumble of pubs, chippers, corner groceries, and tradesmen, you find new shops with designer clothes in the window and fancy restaurants serving postmodern cuisine from all over the world. On Liverpool Road, I passed a storefront with a sign that read “Flotation Tank” and thought I might keel over on the spot, pursued by relentless California as poor Scrooge was dogged by ghosts.

  But I was saved by the sight of another store across the way, painted a lush green and in perfect trim, its hand-lettered sign advertising “H. Crabb, Concertina Maker.” In a sense, the contrast sums up London at the moment. Like most sophisticated European capitals, the city is going global, but there remains a quintessentially English quality at its core, although you may have to hunt for it now.

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p; Still, after some diligent legwork and with the help of a realtor, I landed in a neighborhood that’s relatively unspoiled, in a flat at Highbury Terrace in a block constructed in 1789. The flat has high ceilings and big windows that look out on Highbury Fields, a crescent-shaped park of some 27 acres, where you can always count on an animal lover to be walking an incredibly well-behaved dog. In the Georgian period, the area was favored because it was on a slight rise, above the clamor, soot, and smog of the city; gents who did business in London but wanted a more tranquil, rural residence were the first to move in.

  At the same time, Highbury Barn—a converted farmer’s barn—was notorious as a “pleasure resort,” especially in the mild summer months, when you could participate in lawn bowling and trapshooting and consume strong ale by the hogshead. It hit its rowdy apex in the 1860s, when the owner built a music hall and imported famous continental performers—among them Blondin, a celebrated tightrope artist—but he ran into problems with his neighbors, now Victorian conservatives, who objected to the drunken behavior and finally denied him a license to operate.

  Highbury Barn is currently our shopping strip. The barn, refurbished, still stands and serves as the local pub, where the habit-prone regulars repeat their ritual imbibing (and often their warmed-over conversations) on a daily basis. I’ve never seen the publican outside his establishment; he seems to live in a purgatory of cigarette smoke, recorded pop music, and flashing fruit machines, his right arm a little twitchy from pulling so many taps.

  The strip has two news agents and also a pair of greengrocers, who appear to be waging a silent war. There’s a great divide between them. The younger merchant, a tough, unshaven guy who doesn’t radiate happiness over his earthly lot, allows customers to select their own fruit and vegetables; while the older fellow is a traditionalist and does the selecting for you. That may seem a small point, but it isn’t among the English.