We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  We made ourselves at home—because it felt like home. On our first night, we made a baked potato bar and played Scrabble at the dining room table. We celebrated New Year’s Day by swimming at a nearby beach. Sophie stayed up late into the night texting with friends back home. Katrina was outside taking extraordinary time-lapse photos of the night sky. I parked myself in the distant wing of the house, where I enjoyed my airplane bottles of Johnnie Walker and wrote about the previous year in my journal. We came together in the living room at midnight to welcome the New Year, sixteen hours ahead of our friends back home.

  Beauty Point was surrounded by a tall electric fence to keep the wallabies out. Wallabies look like small kangaroos. As tourists, we were thrilled to spot them jumping across the road or in the bush. Hey, we’re in Australia! For the locals, wallabies are nuisances. They eat flower gardens and destroy the natural vegetation. Every time we drove in or out of Mark’s parents’ property, we had to open the electric gate and then close it behind us. Early in our stay, there was a massive electrical storm. During the storm, the electronic gate stopped working, which I discovered only after driving from the house to the gate. There was not enough room to turn around, so I put the SUV in reverse and began backing up. After about thirty yards, I heard a loud scraping noise. I stopped and pulled slowly forward, causing more scraping.

  The SUV had grinded against a short light post. The light post was fine, but there was a scratch on the vehicle running across two side panels. This was going to be a four-digit repair. How sadly ironic: For all my driving on the left side of the road in New Zealand and Australia, I did the damage while going slowly in reverse. Leah and I expected the budget situation to get better in Asia; the question was how much damage we would do before then—literally and figuratively.

  When we returned to Hobart, I dropped the rental car at the airport and reported the damage to a cheerful agent. “Did you sign up for the insurance coverage, Mr. Wheelan?” she asked. And then before I could answer, “Oh, I see that you did not.”

  “No,” I acknowledged, reflecting on the forty-five dollars I had saved by declining the coverage.

  “It sure comes in handy sometimes,” she said jauntily. “You’ll get an e-mail from the company with the charge for the repairs. Shall we put that on the same credit card?” she asked.

  “Why not?” I said.

  We bade farewell to Katrina once again. She flew to Sydney to meet Bevin. Katrina’s departure coincided with a major VLACS deadline for Sophie. Per our negotiated agreement, a rigidly defined quantity of work was due at midnight local time. At six o’clock, Sophie informed us that she would be submitting an extra criminal justice assignment—the one class she enjoyed—instead of a chemistry assignment. “It’s the same amount of net progress,” she pointed out.

  “You have to submit an assignment in chemistry,” Leah replied.

  “Either one is fine,” Sophie argued.

  “Let’s consult the text of the agreement,” I offered. I retrieved my little blue notebook, as if we were diplomats trying to resolve an international dispute. Thankfully, the particulars of this treaty were clear: Sophie’s bid to substitute criminal justice work for chemistry was rejected.

  From seven o’clock to nine o’clock, Sophie took advantage of the excellent Wi-Fi to watch Friends. Then, as I struggled to uphold my pledge not to nag, she began looking at colleges on the Internet. She stumbled across John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. One of Sophie’s abiding interests for years had been criminal justice. At ten o’clock, Sophie discovered that John Jay had a volleyball team; she began watching video of the team’s matches against other CUNY schools. “I can definitely play there,” she said. At ten-thirty, she sent an e-mail to the John Jay volleyball coach expressing an interest in the program.

  And then, miraculously, she made her midnight VLACS deadline with reasonably high-quality work.

  We flew to Cairns for our family scuba adventure. The weather was hot and humid, with rain nearly every afternoon. At times, we could not discern if it was raining or not; everything just felt steamy and wet. The only affordable apartment felt like the kind of place we might end up after getting evicted from our home. Legions of ants drilled regularly on the kitchen counters. The grilling utensils were chained to the grill; the swimming pool had an alarming greenish hue. (We used both.) Mostly, we were killing time while CJ and Sophie finished their scuba certification course.

  Katrina and Bevin arrived in town just as we were preparing to leave for the Great Barrier Reef. They rented their own apartment and began the scuba course that CJ and Sophie had just finished. “How are the sores?” we asked Katrina over dinner.

  “They’re getting better,” she insisted nonchalantly. Leah and I inspected her foot and calf. To our eyes, the two round sores were not healing; if anything, they looked larger. Katrina agreed begrudgingly to go to a travel clinic in Cairns if the sores were not better after her dive trip, which would be just a few days behind ours.

  The next morning, Leah, Sophie, CJ, and I boarded the eighty-foot ship on which we would be living for three days with fifteen other divers. As the ship left harbor, several small false killer whales surfaced and began playing in our wake, an auspicious beginning to our ocean adventure. The sea quickly grew rough, however. The crew warned about seasickness and began passing out pills to ward it off. Because Team Wheelan gets motion sick on any moving vehicle bigger than a donkey cart, we eagerly took the medicine—except Sophie. “I don’t get seasick,” she declared. I had given up on changing her behavior. My best hope was that she would throw up overboard rather than in the lounge.

  Fortunately, CJ’s idiot behavior gave Sophie cover to change her mind. On their first dive, the two of them were required to do certain exercises with the instructor to complete their certification: maintain neutral buoyancy underwater; practice using the auxiliary breathing device; do an emergency ascent; and so on. Sophie, CJ, and the rest of their group assembled on the ocean floor for their drills. As CJ tried to maneuver himself into position, he kicked Sophie in the face and knocked out her regulator—the device that enables one to breathe underwater. Nobody likes to be kicked in the face, especially underwater. And Sophie really does not like to be kicked in the face by CJ. To her credit, Sophie did not panic. She retrieved her regulator, using the procedure she had been taught during the certification course, and continued with the dive. When she arrived on the surface, she pointed an accusing finger at CJ: “You endangered my life!”

  CJ replied calmly, “That’s why we did the drills.” It was a fair point, though not the response Sophie was looking for. The two of them patched up their dispute, and we all applauded Sophie for staying calm underwater. More important for the seasickness situation, Sophie told us that she had might have swallowed seawater during the regulator incident and was going to take Dramamine to avoid getting sick. Needless to say, taking Dramamine does not protect against seawater-induced nausea—but it gave Sophie cover to do the sensible thing, which was progress.

  Before each dive, we assembled on the top deck for a dive briefing. The dive master described where we would be going underwater and what we would be seeing. These pre-dive meetings had the feel of a military briefing: compass headings, warnings about the current, and so on. There were instructions like, “Do eighty kicks at a compass bearing of fifty degrees and then turn left at the giant mushroom coral.” I have a prodigiously poor sense of direction aboveground. Underwater, it was worse. All the visual signposts that seemed obvious on the whiteboard were difficult to discern. There are a lot of corals, and many of them look like mushrooms. Leah was nearly as bad at navigating underwater as I was. Getting lost on a coral reef is not as ominous as it sounds; there is always the option of swimming to the surface and looking around. On our first dive, Leah and I popped up two hundred yards from the boat. We signaled to the dive master that we were okay and then opted for a long swim back to t
he ship rather than having the crew pick us up in the dinghy—a little rubber raft nicknamed “The Dinghy of Shame.”

  Once CJ and Sophie finished their certification drills, we could dive as a family. On the second day, I buddied up with Sophie. The dive began well. We saw a massive barracuda lurking under the boat. We glided over a reef shark lounging on the sand. I had rented an underwater camera for the dive, so we were able to get photos of the extraordinary things we were seeing, such as a beautiful jellyfish floating near the surface—a stunning translucent pink, almost like a painting. At about the midpoint of the dive, however, Sophie and I had a navigational dispute. One feature of scuba diving, obviously, is that there is no verbal communication. I was pointing to a sandy wedge in the reef that I believed was a reference point. Sophie was gesticulating strenuously that we should go in a different direction. The underwater argument grew more animated: pointing and waving and assorted facial gestures. (Eye-rolling underwater is even more dramatic because the water and mask magnify the eyes, making them look gigantic.) I prevailed in the end and led us farther in what turned out to be the wrong direction.

  After a dive in which Leah and I surfaced even farther from the boat than usual, CJ probed the source of our poor navigation skills. He held up a black plastic gauge attached to his tank with two round dials: the compass and the pressure gauge (which indicates how much oxygen is left in the tank). “Can you read the compass without your glasses on?” he challenged me.

  I stared at the two blurry gauges. “Which one is the compass?” I asked eventually.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Sophie exclaimed.

  “What about you, Mom?” CJ probed.

  “That one is the compass,” she said, correctly indicating the compass.

  “What is our current heading?” CJ asked, pointing at the needle on the compass.

  “Is that a fifty or an eighty?” Leah replied.

  Mystery solved. Leah commented near the end of our dive adventure, “It’s neat to see the kids get better at things than we are.”

  Later that day we engaged in one of life’s great adventures: the night dive. As with the other dives, we assembled on the top deck for a briefing, only now we were enveloped by darkness. The boat’s underwater lights cast rays of light into the black water, which attracted schools of little fish. The little fish attracted bigger fish. During the dive briefing, we looked overboard and saw reef sharks circling the boat. We geared up, each of us attaching a fluorescent glow stick to our oxygen tank, and then lined up on the dive platform at the back of the boat. A crewmember handed us flashlights, and one at a time we plunged into the dark ocean: a big step into the water, the okay sign while bobbing on the surface, and then a descent down the anchor line.

  During the day, one can look down the rope while descending and see the bottom. At night, one can only see the flashlight beam for five feet or so as it illuminates the green algae waving gently on the anchor rope. Beyond that: darkness. We descended to the bottom and swam in a row, each of us following the glow light on the tank of the diver ahead. Slowly our eyes adjusted, making it possible to see beyond the beams of our flashlights. The diver ahead of me motioned to a wall of coral, where a moray eel was jutting out, its mouth snapping open and shut. We made our way around reef formations, where the giant sea turtles were sleeping with their heads in crevices and their giant bodies sticking out, like small children who cover their eyes and think that no one can see them. A large gray reef shark—with a thick body, not unlike that of a great white—appeared out of the darkness, glided above us, and then disappeared back into the darkness, once again invisible to us. I fought the impulse to wave my flashlight in all directions, looking for that shark or others that might be lurking in the darkness. Instead, I clung tightly to the advice from the dive briefing: “Just admire their beauty. If you don’t do anything stupid, they won’t hurt you.”

  Every dive on the Great Barrier Reef presents some surprise: a hawksbill turtle, a giant clam, a whitetip reef shark. As a boy growing up in Chicago, one of my favorite places was the Shedd Aquarium, which has a huge coral reef exhibit. I remember standing at the window gaping at the teeming life, especially at the posted times when a diver would plunge into the tank and feed the fascinating creatures. Now we were living for days on the real thing. The experience was tinged with sadness, however. On some dives, we navigated through large dead areas, the underwater equivalent of a forest decimated by fire. Both Leah and I concluded independently that the Great Barrier Reef had more barren patches than we remembered from our diving twenty-five years earlier.

  When we reached shore, the dive instructor Adam pulled me aside. “Did you ever tell CJ that we were just joking about his penis blowing up?” he asked.

  “No. Did you?”

  “I assumed you did, mate.”

  The two of us pulled CJ aside and informed him of the joke. He smiled admiringly. “You had me,” he said. “There was one time I was really worried. About ten minutes into the fourth dive—”

  “Stop there, mate,” Adam said. “We don’t need the details.”

  Chapter 12

  Do You Have What It Takes to Cross Four Lanes of Saigon Traffic?

  One must marvel at the resiliency of the place—the remarkable fact that less than fifty years after that gruesome conflict we could return as American tourists. Will there be tourists in a vibrant, thriving Syria in less than half a century?

  WE WERE A LONG WAY FROM AUSTRALIA , having made our way through Southeast Asia to Cambodia. Katrina and I were sitting on the back deck of a long, thin motorboat as we traveled from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, a journey that takes the better part of a day. Our boat was headed north in the Tonlé Sap Lake, which serves as a transportation route between the two cities, as well as a source of fish and water (and sewage disposal) for all the villages along the banks.

  Leah, Sophie, and CJ were in the cabin where there was a modicum of air-conditioning. Katrina and I were taking photos: families in little boats who waved excitedly; fishermen casting nets in the shallows; clusters of simple wooden houses on stilts; groups of schoolchildren walking to or from school along the riverbanks. Katrina was wearing flip-flops, and I noticed that her left foot was red and swollen. She had gone to an urgent care clinic in Cairns, as promised, where a doctor had diagnosed the sores as tropical ulcers—not a staph infection, as she had been told in New Zealand—and prescribed an antibiotic ointment. But now the ulcers were as big as ever; the redness and swelling suggested a secondary infection. Katrina’s red foot would be alarming anywhere, but we were in the middle of a lake in Cambodia.

  “How long has it been like that?” I asked Katrina.

  “Just today,” she said.

  I went inside the cabin to confer with Leah. We decided to take Katrina to a clinic or hospital as soon as we arrived in Siem Reap. The boat felt even slower for those last hours, as I stared at Katrina’s foot trying to persuade myself that the redness was not getting worse.

  We docked in Siem Reap and hired a small van to take us into the city. During the ride, Sophie and CJ speculated that Katrina would most likely have her foot amputated. “You’ll kill it at the Paralympics,” Sophie said.

  “But you have to get one of those new prosthetic limbs—the kind that can receive signals from the brain,” CJ advised. The levity helped a little. Katrina seemed surprisingly unconcerned—naïvely so, to my mind.

  Meanwhile, I called our travel insurance company for guidance. The company keeps a database of vetted medical providers around the world. The person we reached on the phone gave us an address for an international clinic. Once in the city, we hired a tuk-tuk, a small motorized cart with bench seats in the back, to take us there. When we arrived, the clinic looked like it had been shuttered for months, if not years.

  There was no more jovial banter. We instructed the tuk-tuk driver to take us to the Angkor Hospital for Children. By remarkable coincidence, I had visited this hospital with graduate students nine years earlier. I had bee
n impressed by the hospital’s work with children harmed by the millions of land mines left over from the brutal civil war in the 1970s. But never in my wildest nightmares did I think that I would return to the Angkor Hospital for Children with one of my children as a patient.

  A guard met us at the entrance to the hospital, and we showed him Katrina’s foot. “How old is she?” he asked.

  “She’s a child,” I said. “We’re her parents.” For once, Katrina did not quibble.

  The man asked to see her passport. “She’s eighteen,” he said. “I’m sorry. That’s too old.” The Angkor Hospital for Children only treats children up to age sixteen.

  We returned to the waiting tuk-tuk. “I got carded,” Katrina told her siblings. The driver suggested that we go to the city’s main hospital. Our tuk-tuk pulled into the ambulance bay of the Royal Angkor International Hospital, a huge, brightly lit building on one of the city’s main avenues. The lobby was clean and orderly, and Katrina saw a doctor immediately. He assured us that the infection around her sores could be treated with antibiotics. The nurses recommended that Katrina keep the ulcers covered—the opposite of what she had been told in Australia.

  The redness and swelling went away once Katrina began taking the antibiotic, but the underlying medical issue was still there: these two puzzling, circular sores. I texted my parents from the hospital to update them. My mother hectored me to take Katrina’s wounds seriously—an understandable if unhelpful sentiment. For the first time, Leah and I contemplated flying with Katrina to someplace with a top-notch tropical disease clinic, perhaps Singapore or Bangkok. Katrina insisted her leg would be fine, though with less conviction than in the past.