Voyager

by Russell Banks

  I asked Ben how he expected to have a political future with his ragged personal life, drug use, and activist political past. He looked his age to me now, was walking in his old off-centered way, a hillside lope, and his tinted designer glasses no longer hid the pain a man feels when he knows he’s hurt people he loved—people he would not hurt today if given the chance, but he knows he hurt them so badly they will never give him another chance, and he thinks about it every day.

  “When it was first suggested to me that I run for Congress, I told them about everything, the wildness, the political activism, the drugs, the divorces. Everything, Russ. Even the parts I can’t remember. Took it all out of the closet and dumped it in front of them. They said fine. Down here folks understand a reformed sinner, and they deeply mistrust that feller throwing the first stone. A good thing, too,” he added.

  Deep in the arboretum behind Morehead Planetarium, we came upon a small bridal party, girls in their pastel-colored dresses like huge wobbling chrysanthemums and big-boned sunburnt boys in tuxedoes looking like they were headed to a sports awards banquet. The group stood in a clearing among rosebushes with a wall of mountain laurel curving around behind, and in the center, under an arbor covered with yellow roses, the bride and groom were being photographed by the best man. Off to one side, the parents and the preacher and several other adults had gathered together, as if advising one another on how to live without the children now.

  Ben and I moved quickly, silently, past, a pair of old soldiers, slightly grizzled, home briefly from the foreign wars and finding out that everyone they once knew and loved had died or moved on or else had simply forgotten their names and faces. No one’s here now but strangers.

  There were numerous informal, spontaneous get-togethers all over town that morning and afternoon. The only organized function was a combination Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous/Overeaters Anonymous/Gamblers Anonymous meeting that turned out to be surprisingly well attended. Or maybe not so surprisingly. I talked afterward to three friends who were at the meeting, and they seemed oddly clear-eyed, relaxed, as if a great, protracted tension in their lives had been resolved. “It was an important meeting,” one told me. “Really important, Russ.” But he said it as if it had been the opposite of a meeting, a coming together; as if instead it had been the occurrence of a much-desired severance.

  Later that afternoon, there was another bash, this time at Rachel Brousseau’s house, north of Chapel Hill in Carrboro, where redbrick bungalows and modular homes and trailers appeared out of the kudzu along the winding country road with open fields of corn and melons out behind and a black ridge of North Carolina pines at the horizon. Cars were parked on both sides of the road for a half mile.

  “Not one stretch limo,” Ray sadly observed, as we squeezed past the rows of beat-up VWs and Hondas, secondhand station wagons, campers and pickups. It was hot—midafternoon, midsummer, Piedmont hot—but the air conditioner in the RV had come magically back to life again, so I eased the van around the sawhorses at the end of the long driveway and rolled past the strings of people walking in from the road like pilgrims making their way to a shrine, and when I arrived before the house begged Rachel Brousseau to let me park the thing on her lawn. She shrugged, Why not? I shut off the motor and switched on the generator and left the air conditioner running. Four or five bottles of the original case of chardonnay remained in the fridge.

  A pair of pigs was roasting over a wood fire, and a huge parachute tent had been set up in the pinewoods behind the white ranch-style house. Music blasted from speakers set on the ground among the trees, and an enormous crowd milled around the tables of food and iced barrels of beer and soft drinks. An American flag ten feet high and twenty feet long with the peace symbol superimposed over the stripes had been attached to the side of the house—a sad but still powerful, time-shattering image, like the music wailing across the fields all the way to the road and the sight of Paul Hutzler sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a speaker zoned out by the thump-thump-thump of the Moody Blues and the hickory smoke and vinegary smell from the roasting pigs and the half-dozen couples slow-dancing on pine needles and the shirtless kids named America and Starr wandering around at the edges of the crowd—and suddenly I knew that I’d had enough. Whatever I came here to say and do couldn’t be said or done; whomever I came to see couldn’t be seen.

  Lucius was laid out in the van working on his novel and a bottle of chardonnay, and Chris and Saundi were on the sofa talking about the future. Dale was reading her book, and Jerri was napping in the stateroom in back. Carey was off somewhere, last seen following an extraordinarily attractive dark-haired woman he said he was scared of, and Ray and Dave were being interviewed and videotaped by Elva Bishop for a local TV documentary. Kathy I hadn’t seen since last night at Bob Brown’s, when she went off with the Honigmanns to swim in their pond.

  I said to Lucius, “Enough?”

  He looked up for a second. “Plenty.”

  It was Sunday morning, July 6. In New York they were sweeping up a million tons of trash. We’d checked out of our rooms at the Carolina Inn and were waiting around the lobby for Carey and Kathy to phone in and tell us where to pick them up. Then word came to the front desk that they’d meet us at noon at the picnic brunch at Ralph Macklin’s. We groaned—not another crowded barbecue in the midsummer sun. We were thinking very seriously about Monday morning already, and it was an eleven-hour drive to New York.

  Macklin’s was indeed just like the others, only hotter. But there was a lake, we were told, and “lots of folks” had gone down there swimming. The lake turned out to be a recently constructed Corps of Engineers basin with the skeletons of hundreds of drowned trees sticking up like ghosts and a wide, dark red, dried-mud aureole encircling it. A few people were actually swimming in the tepid water, but most stood in the sun along the shore, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices. The party was truly over.

  I rounded up my scattered passengers one by one, then said good-bye and walked back out to the road, where the van sat, cool and waiting, like the F train to Wall Street.

  Everyone accounted for, I was about to join them, when I heard someone call, “Hey, Russ, wait a minute! Got something for you.” It was Tucker Clark, a man whose face, when we were both in our early twenties, so closely resembled mine that coeds who had spent the previous night with Tucker would come up to me on Franklin Street and bat their eyes and tell me what a great time they’d had. It was uncanny and often embarrassing, but I thought Tucker was a good-looking guy, so didn’t really mind. Today he looked less like me, but then so did I.

  Tucker took me aside for a second and handed me a folder of photos, large black-and-whites. “I dug these out and meant to show them to you all weekend. There’s one I wanted you to have,” he said, poking the others out of the way, most of which seemed to be of old girlfriends of Tucker’s. “There, there she is,” he said proudly and plucked a five-by-seven from the group and handed it to me.

  It was a black-and-white photograph of Christine, my ex-wife, standing alone and smiling in her tight-lipped, witty way, gazing directly into the camera. Instantly I recognized the place, the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention, and time, early summer, 1965. I stared at her face, and my hands started to tremble, and then I felt myself falling helplessly into the picture. This was the face I came here to see, the one person I came back to meet and talk with. Christine was the person I needed to walk with across the campus greens and through the arboretum, to stop off at the Carolina Coffee Shop and reminisce with, to hang out at a party at Bob Brown’s farm in the dusky rose light watching the fawn-colored horses move nervously back and forth against the split-rail fence, while behind us the peacocks screamed from their perches on the dogwood trees. In the picture she was only a girl—a slim, open-faced girl, trusting and impish and smart—and all the things that truly, lastingly, hurt a person had yet to happen to her or to anyone she loved.

  I handed the picture back to Tuck
er.

  “Keep it,” he said, and I did. I turned and walked alone back down the dry, hot lane to the road, where Carey, Dave, Dale, Kathy, and Ray waited impatiently to return to New York.

  And I thought, Good-bye. Good-bye, my darling. Good-bye.

  PRIMAL DREAMS

  When you fly into Miami International Airport from Newark and drive south and west for two hours on Florida’s Turnpike, you travel through the early twenty-first century in North America. Condos and malls and housing developments like orange-capped mushrooms spring up from horizon to horizon. Fast-food outlets, trailer parks, used-car lots with banners crackling in the breeze, and, in Homestead, the lingering wreckage of last year’s hurricanes—stripped live oak trees, decapitated palms, boarded-up buildings, temporary housing—give way to tomato and sugarcane fields where migrant workers from Jamaica and Mexico toil under the subtropical sun. It’s the inescapable present.

  But then, suddenly, you drive through the entrance to Everglades National Park, and it’s as if you’ve passed through a gate into another time altogether, a distant, lost time eons before the arrival of the first Europeans, before even the rumored arrival of the Arawak in dugouts fleeing the Caribbean archipelago and the invading Caribs. Out on the Anhinga Trail, barely beyond earshot of the cars and RVs lumbering toward the lodge and marina in Flamingo, at the southern end of the park, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seaward-moving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun.

  A rough carpet of water lilies—clenched, fist-size buds about to bloom—floats on the surface of the slough, while just below, long-nosed gars luff in threes and fours, and bass and bluegills collect in schools, abundant and wary of the next upper link in the food chain, but strangely secure, like carp in a Japanese pool, as if here they have no unnatural enemies. A large soft-shelled turtle hauls herself out of the water and patiently begins to lay her dozens of eggs in the gray limestone soil, depositing them like wet vanilla-colored seeds. Farther down the embankment lies the wreckage of an old nest broken open by birds, the leathery shells smashed and drying in the sun. A dark blue racer snake slides into the brush. Mosquitoes gather in slow, buzzing swirls. The sun is high and it’s hot, ninety degrees, with a slight breeze blowing from the east. It’s mid-May, yes—but what century?

  In our time, much of travel that is freely elected by the traveler is time travel. We go to Paris, tour Venice, visit Athens and the Holy Land, mainly to glimpse the past and walk about the cobbled streets with a guidebook, a sun hat, and a furled umbrella—emulating as best we can Henry James in Rome, Flaubert in Cairo. Or we fly to Tokyo, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, perhaps, for a safe, cautious peek into the future. Sometimes, for both the past and the future at once, we make our way to cities like Lagos, Mexico City, Lima. It’s time travel, but it’s strictly to the past and future of humanity that we’ve gone.

  For some of us, that’s not enough. We want to travel even farther in time, to view and imagine anew the planet without billions of human beings on it. For this we get up an expedition and float down the Amazon on a raft or we go off to Africa and clone ourselves a Teddy Roosevelt safari and shoot the large animals with cameras instead of guns. Some of us traipse off to the Arctic or to uninhabited deserts or to mountaintops—journeying to the last remaining places where a traveler can be alone, more or less, and view the planet as it was before we started killing it.

  But who can afford that? Who has the time? With only a week or two available and a modest amount of cash in hand, most of us are obliged to look for places closer to home. For me, when in search of this type of time travel, one of the most satisfying places to go is the Florida Everglades. The reasons are many and complex. Of no small importance, the Everglades is easy to get to, especially for a traveler living in the eastern United States. The park is a smooth seventy-mile drive from downtown Miami. And it is vast in size; you can get lost there. It is the second-largest national park in America outside Alaska—twenty-two hundred square miles, an area approximately the size of Delaware. And despite its proximity to one of the most densely populated regions in America, it is, for its size, one of the least visited parks in the system, especially from April to November. You can be alone there, or nearly so.

  But more to the point, every time I climb into my time machine (usually an air-conditioned rental car picked up at the Miami International Airport) and travel into the Everglades, I journey to a place that has a shivering personal resonance for me. I almost always go by myself. It’s less distracting that way, and I don’t want to be distracted, because, once there, my imagination is instantly touched at its center, and all the world seems significant and personalized, as in a powerful dream. It’s my dreamtime, and I don’t want anyone, even someone I love and trust, to wake me.

  Most people, if they’re lucky, have a place or two where this happens, but for me it occurs in the Everglades. Who knows why? Childhood visions of pre-Columbian Florida and the Caribbean, maybe, induced by stories of Columbus, de Soto, and that master of time-travelers, Ponce de León, in which I helplessly identified with the wide-eyed European conquerors. Followed years later by adolescent pilgrimages to the Keys in naive search of Ernest Hemingway’s source of inspiration—as vain an enterprise as Ponce’s, maybe, but who knew that then? And over the years, repeated visits to the Glades, by accident or casual circumstance, building up a patina of personal associations, until now I enter the park with an expectancy based on nostalgia for a lost self—nostalgia for the New England boy reading about the Arawak Indians and Columbus, for the youth trying to become a novelist, for the reckless young man footloose in South Florida.

  It’s an expectancy that is almost always met. I park my time machine and walk out onto the Anhinga or the Gumbo Limbo Trail, step by step moving along the catwalk of my own personal time line. I keep returning, and with increasing clarity I see more of the place and more of my past selves. And more of the past of the planet as well.

  Beyond any other national park, the Everglades bears repeated visits, justifying a traveler’s return trips, but maybe requiring them, too. Without intending it, over the years I’ve acquired from these visits a gradual accumulation of information—about my layered self, I suppose, and, more important, about the place—which has helped me learn to look at the Everglades and see it for what it is, instead of what it isn’t.

  The first few times I didn’t get it. There are no high mountains, no rushing cataracts, no grand panoramic vistas. There’s no rain forest, no powerful continent-draining river, no rocky seashore. The Glades is quiet and low and slow, a shallow, almost invisible river of grass, an intricate, extremely fragile subtropical ecosystem that seems shy and difficult of access to the human eye, which is, of course, one of the reasons humans have come so close to destroying it—and may yet succeed.

  To see the Everglades for what it is and not what it isn’t, you have to develop a kind of bifocal vision, as if you were floating down the Mississippi on a raft with Huck Finn. You have to learn to switch your gaze constantly from the concrete to the abstract, from the nearby riverbank to the distant sky. You need an almost Thoreauvian eye for detail and for the interrelatedness of nature’s minutiae. It’s a 1.5-million-acre Walden Pond I’m talking about here, the largest wetland in the United States. From November through May there are between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand wading birds in the Everglades. More than one hundred species of butterflies have been identified in the park.
Fifty species of reptiles, including twenty-six species of snakes and sixteen of turtles. Eighteen species of amphibians. Three hundred forty-seven species of birds. Forty species of mammals. More than one thousand species of plants. There are fifty-two varieties of the small striped Liguus snails that you see clinging to the trunks of the live oaks along the short Gumbo Limbo Trail, where, as you stroll, you can catch the skunklike smell of opening white stopper buds, used in ancient times by the Arawak and the first white settlers as a specific against dysentery.

  The Gumbo Limbo Trail winds through great, twisted old live oak trees with epiphytes clinging to the trunks and upper branches, and dead-looking brown resurrection ferns at the roots that burst greenly into life after a rain. The trail is circular and begins and ends at the hundred-foot-tall royal palms of Paradise Key. The key is a hummock, a gentle, almost imperceptible rise in the blond watery plain, more like a solidified limestone sea-swell than an actual key or island. The majestic palms, which these days tower photogenically in front of Miami hotels and cluster around the old Bebe Rebozo compound on Key Biscayne and a thousand other estates, appeared first on the continent here in the Everglades, their seed carried by wind and water from the Caribbean thousands of years ago to catch and eventually prosper on this very hummock. A short way off the trail, I notice a small, still pool of water covered with bright green slime—duckweed—which, seen up close, turns into a glistening skin, as clean and beautiful and serene as snakeskin over the dark, turbulent, fecund water below. I lean down and look closer and imagine I can see into the thrashing molecular soup of life itself.