The Awkward Pose

Over the Top

Posted on 04/27/2013 by paulefallon

Even after all these years I am a kid on a plane. I clamor for the window seat and poke my face to the window during takeoff and landing. Every time I am awed by the immensity of our earth; every time I am awed by how small airplanes render our cozy home and its seven billion people.

This week I enjoyed my longest flight ever; New York to Hong Kong, sixteen hours with the sun on my left shoulder the entire way. I probably didn’t make any friends in route; while everyone else shuttered their windows to watch movies or snooze in the pretend dark, I kept mine open to compare the view against our animated navigation map. Perhaps I should have shut my shade and pulled out my blanket, I was dog tired, but fancying myself as both Admiral Perry and Charles Lindberg was too exciting.

According to any flat map Hong Kong is straight line from New York through LA and Hawaii. But since the earth is a sphere, I figured we’d veer north as we flew west, cross over Canada and Alaska and then down Japan. I never guessed the pilot would head straight north along the seventy-fourth meridian, a line through Quebec, Newfoundland and Greenland. Apparently the shortest distance to traverse our full twelve hour time zone change goes right over the North Pole.

Glaciers emerge three hours into the flight; immense, endless mountain peaks cradling hundreds of feet of snow, so white the sun burns them pink and blue with streaks of orange flame. Five miles above the surface, at 600 miles per hour with a strong tail wind, the plane floats above a buoyant mist. I stare for hours from my magic carpet of hulking metal. The snow never ends. The daylight never ends. I know intellectually that these glaciers are melting, fast, due to humans spewing carbon from our machines, even this very plane. But flying over miles and miles of blinding white, it is unfathomable that these ice mountains are contracting; they seem rock solid.

We pass Godthab, Angmassavik, Godhavn. Place names more than actual places. My eyes burn from the glare; I force myself to shut them. I rest maybe half an hour until, like a child anxious for Christmas morning, I return to my view. I may never get this close to Santa Claus again.

We are over the heart of Greenland. My flight screen displays no place names, there will be no evidence of humans until we descend the other side. The sun sits square in my face, ten degrees above an amorphous horizon of grey blue clouds and sky. The wind has risen; literally, the cloud mass that was beneath us is now right at my nose, whizzing by. I can feel our speed.

The north coast of Greenland approaches. My map reorients to display a top down view of the earth. It is weird to see our location pinpointed in relation to London, Caracas, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Los Angeles, places that could not be connected from any other perspective.

The Arctic in spring is like a gigantic unglazed urn, putty color with myriad tiny surface cracks that spread into jagged rivers of black surface water. Winter’s solid ice is already breaking up. The interface of the Arctic Ocean to Siberian land mass is amorphous; the two vast expanses merge beneath a blanket of ice and snow. Eventually the ice gives over completely to huge swales of snow; hundreds of miles of merengue unfolding beneath us.

We fly over land for several hours before I see the first indication of human intervention – razor straight power lines or pipe lines that cut through the snowy forest. Another hour passes before there is a road, and not until we are over China can I discern fields and farms.

According to a clock the journey takes sixteen hours but in fact a daytime flight over the North Pole lapses independent of time. The sun is fixed; we are suspended in a perennially late afternoon. Sunset coincides with our descent into Hong Kong.

I left one of the busiest, densest cities in the world and disembark into another. Hong Kong is thick with people, towering buildings, and noise. I navigate customs, board the train into the city, transfer to the subway, and drag my valise three blocks to the hotel. It is hot and crowded. I think perhaps my journey over the arctic was a dream. Until I unpack. My clothes are so cold, so stiff I need to warm them with my hands before they will conform to a hanger. The outside temperature at the pole was 69 degrees below zero and my belongings testify to that extreme.

The Endless Arctic

Posted in China | Tagged Arctic, Arctic Ocena, China, climate change, Global warming, Greenland, Hong Kong, Siberia | 4 Comments

Four Days After

Posted on 04/21/2013 by paulefallon

Four days after the eight year old boy

Who came to watch his dad run a very long race

Was killed

And his sister lost her limb

Chaos is our companion.

Spring is ripe.

Daffodils thick along the banks of the Charles

Bright yellow as the police vests on every corner

The merry-go-round glistens in the Common

Opposite the encampment of army fatigues and Humvees

Sirens float on the breeze like birdsong.

We snuggle in solidarity.

We walk carefully

We call our loved ones

‘Stay safe’ is our salutation of choice

We buy molasses cookies for a buck to support One Fund relief

Comfort food for a discomforting time

Were people so angry one hundred, one thousand years ago?

Did they fantasize about killing indiscriminately?

Or are we humans becoming less stable, less sane?

It hardly matters

Killing was harder then.

No easy bombs available to ignite a flash of hate into such tragedy

We have suspects, two young men

Compiled from human and digital witnesses

Ethnic immigrants ten years in Cambridge

High schooled with my own children, who recall them vaguely

Four days after the bombs explode

Investigation reaches a head

The suspects stir, we pursue

Car chases, hijackings, cop killed, store robbed, one boy dead

Entire city clamped down

We breathe shallow, each in our own house, peering timidly at the grey streets

Cop cars sweep through every five minutes

Helicopters hang overhead

Hours pass, the city grows restless but only officials move

Second bomber found, wounded, arrested alive

City bursts with joy and celebration

The ordeal is past

A bizarre feat to celebrate, but we need it

Boston’s been remarkable.

The speed of response, the medical care, the citizenry’s patience

Champions under pressure

We hold our head high among the pantheon of place-named terror.

Columbine, Oklahoma City, Newtown

I fantasize about running the marathon next year.

We all do.

To show that we can

To demonstrate that terror will not stop us

Posted in United States | Tagged Boston, Boston Bombing, Boston Marathon, Cambridge | 5 Comments

Odd Neighbors on the Mall

Posted on 04/20/2013 by paulefallon

I went to DC to visit friends and take in spring. The Cherry Blossoms were still short of full glory, but the weather was perfect and the National Mall bustling. I was interested in visiting the National Museum of the American Indian, the inverted mass of swirling sandstone that occupies the triangle between the National Air and Space Museum and the Capitol so we ducked out of the sun for a few hours to explore.

NAMI’s exterior landscape is intricate and varied; the interior atrium, a kiva blown up to Pantheon proportion, is impressive; the grand stairs and extensive gift shops are integral parts of any contemporary museum experience. NAMI’s exhibits are contextual and dense with text. Since we did not want to spend the entire day indoors, we focused on the fourth floor – one gallery called Universes highlighted the spiritual and social constructs of several tribes strung along the entire Western Hemisphere, while another titled Experiences was rich in artifacts and commentary about the Indian / European encounter – money, disease, weapons, bibles, and treaties.

When NAMI opened it came under criticism, and it is easy to see why. Indian heritage is presented selectively; some tribes receive extensive space while others are absent. The curators created cultural groups from each tribe presented; the materials are filtered through the lens of contemporary descendants. Most of the museum’s commentaries are quotes from these coordinators which reinforce the idea that we are getting a specific, likely biased, point of view circa 2000 rather than a presentation based on more objective criteria. The result does not seem wrong so much as arbitrary and incomplete. Perhaps that is appropriate, for our view of American Indians is not objective.

Between NAMI’s exhibit halls is a large window facing the National Air and Space Museum directly across 4^th Street, opened 27 years earlier and a mere hundred feet away. Yet the Air and Space Museum might as well as exist in another country, in another era. I remember going there when it first opened, thrilled by the incredible rockets, the majestic wings, the museum’s unrivaled confidence in technology, and by extension its unrivaled confidence in us.

There is nothing confident about the National Museum of the American Indian. It is an exercise in sentimentality, a monument to assuage guilt, a building cozy to the Capitol that celebrates the cultures we trampled over; cultures too slow moving, too much rooted in the earth to suit our frenzied drive to explore, expand, and conquer.

These are odd neighbors on our National Mall, but they serve a useful duality. We have countered the bravado of conquering air and space with reflections of the remnants of those who predate us. I was tired when we left the Museum of the American Indian, it is a challenging place. We strolled along the Mall under the glorious spring sun. I stopped and looked back at the two structures, one all cubes and right angles, one all precarious curves. Each is carefully considered, with its own internal logic, but they don’t look well together. Yet they are each part of us, each an important part of the American experience. I wondered if perhaps the next generation might create a museum on the Mall that celebrates the intersection of technical prowess and human dignity. I have no idea where it would fit or what it might look like, but it is a monument that we truly need.

Posted in United States | Tagged Museum of American Indian, Naitional Air and Space Museum, National Mall, Washington DC | 1 Comment

Cyclist Power

Posted on 04/14/2013 by paulefallon

I am getting in touch with my inner radical. I don’t really have the disposition for it, but at this moment, I’m pretty amped about injustices I perceive all around me.

I am accustomed to the litany of complaints that automobile drivers fire at bicyclists; that we are heedless of safety, that we weave in traffic, that we run stop signs and lights. When I ride, the tug of traffic laws often works against my flow. I am not reckless, I do not cause cars to brake or swerve, but neither am I slave to a mechanical light at an empty intersection.

Recently the City of Boston added bicycle lanes on many streets and notation directly on pavement where bikes and cars share the road. The recognition should make me happy as well as safe, but just the opposite has occurred. Now that I have designated places for my bike I want others to acknowledge them, and they do not. Cars, trucks and buses violate bicycle space with more relish and abandon than the most intrepid cyclist ever encroached on motor vehicles.

The bike lane in front of South Station is ignored by the lines of traffic at that busy intersection. Last week I pulled up behind a BMW and waved my hand to indicate the car was filling the bike lane. The guy pulled over, rolled down his window and gave me a mouthful. I smiled and pedaled on. Considering the often true adage about the difference between BMW’s and porcupines (BMW’s have their pricks on the inside) I never tangle with guys in Beemers.

One night I cycled along Mass Ave from the Boston Conservatory to Harvard Square, over the river and past MIT. I counted six different vehicles that blocked the bike lane or cut me off, including two MBTA buses who passed me only to swing back into the bike lane, stop, and unload passengers without pulling all the way curbside. As I approached the square a couple of pedestrians actually danced in my path to upset my motion. Realizing they were drunk I kept my distance, but even drunks don’t play chicken with cars like that.

I have been riding my bicycle through downtown Boston for over twenty years, adapting to the car-centric traffic by not going too fast, riding defensively and making sure I can be seen. Now, with bicycle consciousness on the rise, I find myself angry more and more of the time. Why? Because a taste of acceptance, a taste of recognition, a taste of power is an intoxicating thing. I used to view motor vehicles as fearsome objects to avoid; now I think of them like Republicans – dinosaurs whose monopoly on moving through the world is only going to diminish.

Still, I feel their anger as well. If cars and buses respect bike lanes, they acknowledge a loss of pavement that used to be theirs. In the good old days cyclists were intruders whom they could dismiss. Now we have our own strip of road but since every licensed driver put kindergarten in their rear view mirror long ago, sharing is hard.

In the ranking of civil rights, the rights of cyclists to navigate as equal parties with any other vehicle is not as important as women’s rights or racial equality or gay rights, but the same dynamics hold sway; the dominate group refuses to yield to the emerging reality. The presence of more and more two-wheeled devices crowds in on them. We make their commute more complex. They are threatened, entrapped in their rolling metal, while we aerobically dance around them, proliferating with every warm day and hike in the price of gasoline. We are here, we are healthy and we are not going away. It’s just a matter of time before we establish a new equilibrium. The cars and trucks and buses will acquiesce; they will make the space we deserve. Until then I feel the power of being on the gaining side.

Posted in Bicycling | Tagged Bicycling, bike lanes, City of Boston, cycling, MBTA | Leave a comment

The Gene of Loss

Posted on 04/07/2013 by paulefallon

Last weekend was Easter. We had a great brunch; both of my children came as did some of their friends. They both shove off to distant places this summer; Andy to graduate school in Virginia, Abby to the Peace Corps in Cambodia. These gatherings, already special, will become rare. I am excited by their prospects; my conscious-self proclaims to be content with being an empty nester and I spin adventures of my own future in my head. But my unconscious badgers me. I woke today remembering a scene of terrible isolation I witnessed many years ago.

I was twelve years old the night I walked downstairs on the way to taking out the garbage and heard my dad talking on the phone. I wasn’t eavesdropping; the pair of drafting tables where he worked in the narrow space next to the garage was open to the rest of the house. I passed through it dozens of times a day, on my way to school or the basement or the back yard. My dad was not the kind who sought privacy. But that night all the lights were off save one drafting lamp that cast a hot glow onto his shoulders. He spoke in a tone that begged no one to hear.

“I have son, Peter, who’s fifteen now. He plays basketball at the high school. And my daughter Pat will be in high school next year.”

Dad never called any of us by our given names. Peter was Turtle and Pat was Sugie. He spoke in clipped sentences, with reverential tone. I couldn’t imagine to whom he was talking. I kicked the garage door open in a rush. I was the next child in line and not anxious to hear how his starched prose described me.

The garage was chilly, but I lingered after depositing dinner’s remains; picking up a few stray leaves and dropping them into the galvanized cans, securing the lids, hoping Dad would be off the phone. The chill finally drove me back through his office. He sat in the exact same spot; the same pool of light illuminated his hunched back. He wasn’t speaking now but he was so intent on listening that he did not hear me walk softly behind him. I laid my foot on the first step when he said, in eerie quiet, “Goodnight, Dad. Thanks for calling.” I shot up the stairs so quick I never heard the phone click on the receiver.

I went through the motions of cleaning up the kitchen – it was my night to do the dishes – but my mind stuck on my father’s phone call. My father’s parents, my grandparents, were not strangers in our family; they were much less than that. I didn’t even know that they existed. I suppose I should have been more curious. We saw our maternal grandparents all the time; they were a natural extension of my mother. But my father was so brazenly his own man, so stridently unique that it seemed quite plausible he arrived on earth without the aid of anything so ordinary as a mother and a father. Yet he sounded so ordinary, so feeble, reciting the rudimentary facts of our existence to people who, by any established standard, should have known all about us.

I lay in bed that night and stared at the ceiling, trying to understand what could have happened between my dad and his parents to make them so foreign. Did they have some cataclysmic fall out or was their genetic tie simply too weak to hold over time and distance. I never found out. Though I managed to maintain some connection with my father until he died, we shared a mere flicker of our lives. Not that either of us are men of secrets; rather we each inhabit solitary expanses of psychic space.

I prayed that night I would never be estranged from my family. Though we are an odd assortment with little in common, I have held steady to that desire and extend myself to ensure it is a reality. Forty-six years later, as my own children prepare to strike out in the world, my prayer remains the same.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments

Water Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink

Posted on 03/31/2013 by paulefallon

When the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned the line, Water, water everywhere not any drop to drink in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in 1798, water’s prevalence on this earth might have reached its apex. Barely three hundred years had passed since Columbus demonstrated that the earth was much larger, rounder, and full of ocean than anyone thought, while a mere two hundred years later we were already feeling the pinch of our most precious resource.

This spring I am attending a most incredible series of lectures, Northeastern University’s Open Classroom series. This semester’s theme is Climate Change. Challenges. Solutions. Every Wednesday evening two or three speakers tackle topics such as mitigation, efficiency, fossil fuels, emerging energy options, and national security. Yet every topic cycles back to water; our most predictable barometer of climate change. Our oceans are getting warmer, our storms are getting more violent, our sea levels are rising. Water is essential to our existence here on earth, but it is getting less benevolent all the time.

Every Open Classroom speaker sheds new perspective on the climate issue. But the single image that conveyed a whole new perspective to me was this diagram of the earth, presented by David Titley, Retired Rear Admiral, US Navy that annihilates the idea that we have water, water everywhere. When we say that the earth is three-quarters water what we really mean is that we have relatively shallow puddles covering three-quarters of our surface. But gather that water in one place, make it a single drop, and all the earth’s water creates an 800 mile diameter sphere; one thousand times smaller than the volume of the 8,000 diameter earth itself. Since the potable water on earth is less than 1% of what is available, all the drinkable water on the entire planet would fill an eight mile diameter sphere; the distance I ride my bicycle from my West Cambridge house to my Fort Point Channel workplace each day.

This is but one example of the insightful ways climate change is being presented in Northeastern’s series. Classes end on April 17, but all the lectures are available online at http://www.northeastern.edu/policyschool/lectures-and-seminars/open-classroom/video-recordings.

Our world is more complex than that of the ancient mariner. Water is expanding, yet it is hardly everywhere. Still, there is but a tiny drop to drink.

Posted in Personal | Tagged climate change, David Titley, Northeastern University, Open Classroom, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Water water everywhere | 1 Comment

Front Row Challenge

Posted on 03/24/2013 by paulefallon

Twice a year, March and November, Bikram Yoga Boston holds a thirty day challenge – thirty classes in thirty days – to raise money for Dana Farber Cancer Center and to entice people to do more yoga. Although the ultimate goal is thirty classes in thirty days, less frequent practitioners are encouraged to create more realistic challenges; perhaps coming twice a week instead of once, five times a week instead of three. But what challenge exists for a zealot like me, since I already practice every day when I am in town.

On Saturday morning of challenge day two, the hot room is crowded and I wind up placing my mat in the front row. I dislike being in the front row. I tell others it’s because I can see only parts of me in the mirror, but in truth I don’t like the front row because it is hotter and the air is still; the ceiling fans barely make an impression on the bodies strung tight against the mirror. The front row is the scene of my greatest struggles. The only time I was so faint I had to escape the room, I was in the front row; the only time I was so hot I had to move my position mid-class, I was in the front row.

All of these trials race through my mind as I arrange my mat and towels. My body looms large so close to the mirror, my middle aged defects reflect back at me, brutally large. As I warm-up I realize what my March challenge needs to be: thirty days of class in the front row.

The month is more than half over and I have claimed the front row every day. The first few days I mourned passing my preferred spot under the fan. Midway through class, when some teachers accelerate the fans to provide a dose of relief, I bemoaned how little breeze swept over me. But I also realized that when I practice under the fan, I continually gauge the air movement. It is a welcome distraction but a distraction nonetheless. In the first row the fan is irrelevant and I have one less obstruction to my meditation.

The true virtue of practicing in the front row is focus. Although it is difficult to see my entire body in one view, I can concentrate on a particular point (that dreaded knee that will never lock) with laser sharpness. In the last month every one of my postures has improved, the balance postures most of all.

I am confident that I will remain in the front row for the remainder of my challenge. The real question is whether I will drift back under the fan when the challenge is over, or adopt the front row as my new normal. Only time will tell. The point of a challenge is to stretch my practice. Day after day in the front row I have lost all discomfort being there. I can choose that line if I want, I can slip back under the fan, or I can select an entirely different perspective in the hot room. For when we best our fears, however insignificant they may be, we grow stronger. We have more good choices available to us, which provide us more paths to pursue our goals.

Posted in Yoga | Tagged 30 day challenge, Bikram yoga, Bikram Yoga Boston, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, yoga | 2 Comments

Saint Patrick’s Day Musings

Posted on 03/17/2013 by paulefallon

My father loved Saint Patrick’s Day, though as befitted his Black Irish smoldering good looks and erratic temperament, I don’t recall ever celebrating it in any obvious way. No parades, no crowds, no corned beef and cabbage; Saint Paddy’s was day to drink whiskey with more purpose than other days.

Jack Fallon died in 1992, or maybe it was 1993; I can never remember the year. He died in February, that much I recall. It was cold and grey and the drive from Boston to Hackettstown, NJ was long each way.

I left about four in the morning to drive to the funeral so that I would be there by ten; plenty of time to have lunch with two of my three brothers, my sister, and my father’s widow Lani. After lunch there were a few awkward hours hanging about the small apartment where they lived, going to the funeral home, settling accounts, wondering who else might show up.

A few people wandered in for the late afternoon service. I read a piece I wrote about my father, something about baseball, which he loved. I sang Judy Collins’ anthem, My Father, which I love. It was raw at the cemetery; bitter winds came off the side of the hill where he laid to rest on a hillside with a better view than life ever afforded him. We ate another meal in another restaurant with a group of ten or so, and then we went back to his place, Lani’s place now, for a few more hours of beer and recollection.

I had a long drive back that night, but I did not feel in a rush. I had to pick up my young children at seven the next morning. Their mother and I were on brittle terms, not yet divorced. Neither of us dared to ask for or bestow any flexibility on our child care arrangements; both playing perfect parents-in-exile while under the microscope of the legal system. Burying my father four states away did not seem adequate excuse for being tardy to pick up my children before their mother went to work.

Still, I lingered. After all, my father would only die once. Finally, about 10 p.m., I left. Five miles along Interstate 80 east towards New York traffic came to a complete halt. We sat for four hours in the middle of the night for a reason I will never know. A pitch black, raw February night, clear as the Ezra Brooks bourbon I poured my father every day growing up. Everyone said I would be a priest, but they prepared me to be a bar tender.

As suddenly as the cars stopped, they began to move again. I reached the GW Bridge around 3 a.m. and had been awake a full 24 hours before I entered Connecticut. I pulled into my driveway at 6:45, washed my face and picked up my children.

I remember so much about my father dying. I just can’t remember the year. That’s how it is with some people. Our relationships are so complex, our idiosyncrasies so integrated into out habits, that the details obliterate the larger picture. Twenty years on, more or less, I remember all these fragments. What eludes me is what we meant to one another and how we loved each other, yet how little we knew each other. That is why the details cling so dear to me, and that is why Saint Patrick’s Day, that most Irish of holidays, is such a contradiction. All the carousing is a bluff, for we Irish are a solitary people. We call it a holiday, but for some of us, like my father, what we savor is the gloom.

Posted in Personal | Tagged Black Irish, Ezra Brooks, gloom, Judy Collins, My Father, Saint Patrick's Day | 3 Comments

Wake to the Magic of BoCo

Posted on 03/10/2013 by paulefallon

Despite the wet snow on the ground, spring is upon us, which means a bounty of extraordinary performance experiences at The Boston Conservatory. This weekend’s Thoroughly Modern Millie, their major musical, rivaled the production I saw on Broadway. Every voice was terrific, every tap step sharp. Millie, played by the understudy, began the show with anxious wonder that actually fit the part well, but by the second act she was as confident and endearing as any Millie ought to be.

Beside the main stage productions, there are moving piano master’s recitals, student thesis productions in the Zack Box, and the incredible showcases for freshman, seniors and graduate students; a chance for every one of these talented performers can shine.

Not everything presented at BoCo is as accessible as Thoroughly Modern Millie. The Dance Division under the direction of Cathy Young grows more capable and confident every year, and they tackle complex works. Ballet is an art form that I need help in appreciating, so when my daughter Abby and I attended Winter. Dance! we stopped into the President’s reception beforehand to sample the terrific desserts and to hear Cathy Young introduce that evenings dances. She described Wake a world premiere choreographed by Robert Moses, as a series of moving images that evoke every meaning of the word.

As the lights came up on the group of sixteen women in depression era peasant dresses obscured behind a scrim, I sensed the dawn, albeit not a very cheerful one. They roused from sleep and once the men in work clothes and suspenders arrived things perked up; everyone displayed ‘excited latent possibilities’ and then ‘aroused conscious interest’ in each other, phrases I pulled directly from Merriam-Webster’s additional definitions of the term ‘wake’.

In the second movement a projected image of water slithering beneath the shadow of a large tree formed the backdrop for reverie. It reminded me that each of us forms a wake, initiated by our actions. It trails behind us in a distorted reflection. It can merge seamlessly with others or cause turbulence. Our wake is the aftermath that flows from whatever we do. Once unleashed, we cannot control its impact.

Finally, of course, we have the wake, the formal standing over the dead, keeping watch to ensure safe passage from this world to the next. The women moved graciously over the men as they landed, one by one, in a row of silent corpses. Towards the end they jerked, sudden and quick, before reclining into eternal slumber. Was it their souls rising out of their bodies to some eternal reward, or the last gasp of a life yet fulfilled? Wake did not offer us the answer. Instead, it prompted a riddle from me. ‘What single word describes something we do every day, then trails behind us, and stands above us after we die?

Whether you seek to contemplate the riddles of life or just want the thrill of incredible tapping feet, get yourself to The Boston Conservatory this spring and let these gifted performers move you. They are awake with energy and talent. Every way that they touch us nourishes and enriches.

Note: You can subscribe to a weekly calender of Boston Conservatory events at http://www.bostonconservatory.edu. Enjoy!

Posted in Personal | Tagged ballet, BoCo, Cathy Young, Robert Moses, The Boston Conservatory, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Wake | 1 Comment

Island within Island

Posted on 03/03/2013 by paulefallon

Islands are sanctuaries. We are drawn to their simple clarity. Their geographic confines liberate our psyche. We envision life on an island as purer and more satisfying.

My life in Haiti is simpler than my life in the United States. When I arrive on Hispaniola I feel unencumbered. I rarely use the telephone; I check email but once a day. My mind wanders Haiti’s hilly contours. Daydreaming is not merely tolerated, it is encouraged. After all, I am on an island.

However, after eighteen visits I have developed responsibilities in Haiti. I have work and a semblance of schedule. The work is satisfying, except when it’s frustrating; the poverty motivates me, except when it numbs me. From my earliest visits I have developed a habit; whenever Haiti’s challenges overwhelm me, I pause and look out over the sea. There, floating on the horizon is La Gonave, rising out of the mist, a place imbued with peace and calm; beautiful in its simplicity. From a distance La Gonave’s serenity offers me solace.

Lex and Renee Edme, founders of the school we are building, carry long memories. Last summer two ideas came over me and I sent them an email request. I asked if we could inscribe Luke 6:48 somewhere on the new school (He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.). I also asked them if we could visit La Gonave. Lex was born on the island and has a boat that could take us there, on a rare day when neither work nor church beckoned. I mentioned these wishes only once, but in the fall, as the school’s walls rose, Renee pointed to the surface above the front door. “This is where your Bible verse will go.” Then, on the final day of my last scheduled trip, Lex announced that we would go to La Gonave.

The view of La Gonave from the hill above town or along the beach is one of god’s most beguiling creations. On clear days the island stands in bold relief against a crystalline sky and the smooth sea. When the weather is cloudy, it billows among its cumulus neighbors. On hazy days it merges with the muted blue-green of sea and sky, an ethereal realm of imagination more than any actual place of rock and soil and root.

I know that La Gonave is poor, so poor that men leave for months on end to be day laborers in Grand Goave. I know that La Gonave is awash in voodoo and mysticism; the natives crowned the Marine sent to patrol the island during last century’s American occupation as the ‘white king’ in fulfillment of an ancient myth. I know that La Gonave is a poorer, simpler version of Haiti, yet it had become my Bali Hai and I was compelled to visit.

The boat ride from Grand Goave to Au Pac takes about an hour. Unfortunately for the first twenty minutes we motor past the garbage from the river floating on the bay. Eventually the water turns ultramarine, the swells rise, the cross currents press against our hull and my dream island slowly grows. Tiny squares appear in coves along the shore, other structures emerge along the ridge line. Steep hills littered with scrub trees connect the parallel habitations. Everything comes into focus. Lex slows the boat to a crawl. His navigator stands at the bow, eyeballs the bottom and hand signals us through the narrow channel that leads to the small pier in the center of the village. Lex points out the school on a coral rock outcropping to the east; we have brought clothes and pencils and paper and cartons of energy biscuits. When we tie up, villagers line the dock. They brigade our supplies to the narrow sandy beach.

Au Pac fulfills every fantasy of an island paradise. The shallows of the cove are perfectly clear, fish squiggle among the wavy sea grass, clusters of clams cling to the coral bottom. Thousands of conch shells in subtle pinks and oranges form a berm between the water and the sand. We parade our goods up to the school where twenty-five or so children sit in pews and recite the numbers on the chalk board. Lex’s arrival upends the lesson. In minutes the entire village arrives. While Lex distributes his bounty I linger in the shady breeze outside. Powchino, a painfully thin local man with a pocketful of English at his disposal, appoints himself my guide. He tells me of the fish they catch in their wooden junks morning and night to ship to Port-au-Prince. He shows me the oblong sponges they collect with snorkeling gear and sell for $15 a kilo to a fragrance concern in Miami, though I cannot quite understand their purpose. He tells me of his brothers and sisters, his parents on the island, his own madame and two children.

After all of our cartons are empty we parade the length of town, a single path with shacks on either side, the sea to the south and marshes to the north. The houses are no more than six inches above sea level. At every storm the citizens scamper into the mountains, the sea washes through their world and then they return. There is no electricity to short circuit, no upholstered furniture to mildew, nothing that can’t survive a good salt water wash. It seems odd to me that they don’t build their houses on the slope, but it is their life and they choose to live it tight to the sea.

After two hours we have seen what there is to see. We climb back on our boat, I palm Powchino a twenty for his guidance and we shove off. We enjoy cokes and chicken salad from our cooler; it would have been rude to eat in Au Pac where we saw no crops growing or evidence of any food once our biscuits were devoured. The sea is mid-day calm, the cross current peters out, as smooth as vintage dimpled glass, as ancient as the village we left behind. The island of Hispaniola lay ahead, but it does not offer the comforting mirage that La Gonave presents from afar. Haiti rises high; the peninsula wraps around Grand Goave’s wide cove like monster claws. Compared to La Gonave, Haiti is complicated.

No adventure in Haiti is worth its salt without a hiccup, and sure enough we have watery gas in our outboard; it takes over two hours to sputter home. I do not mind. I sit in the bow and let my feet dangle in the direction of home. I think about Powchino and his parents and children, day in and day out in that village connected to the rest of the world by nothing more than a tenuous channel, no vehicles, no stores, no clinic, no tele-anything. Au Pac is beautiful in daylight, it would be glorious on a starry night, but how tedious it would be day after day, and night after night. Even after visiting, I cannot really understand how the residents pass their time. They exist on an island within an island; they lead a life of abject poverty and abject purity, a life we fantasize about when our world pulses with stress; yet it is a pristine fantasy few of us could bear to live.

Au Pac Village, La Gonave

Au Pac from the Shore

Au Pac Street

Posted in Haiti | Tagged Au Pac, Grand Goave, Haiti, islands, La Gonave | 5 Comments