Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town Read online

  My family was on one of those airline-sponsored tours in which seventy Americans visit nine cities in eleven days, and an hour is allocated to the Prado Museum and perhaps ninety minutes to the palace and grounds at El Escorial. We were going to try to see virtually the entire Iberian Peninsula in the days before and after Thanksgiving.

  Fortunately, very early into this frenetic picaresque, the Caravel jet--a plane now mercifully retired in which one climbed into the passenger cabin through the bowels at the bottom rear of the aircraft--that was taking us from Malaga to Madrid was unable to land in the capital because of bad weather and had to return to Spain's south coast. Rather than stay with the tour and wait for the flight the next morning, my mother suggested that we all take the 10:00 P.M. train to Madrid, and travel, as she put it, like honest-to-God Europeans.

  We did. We were in a six-person compartment with an ornate sliding wooden door that separated us from the aisle and seats that folded down into one massive six-person bed. Somehow my father, my brother, and I wound up on one half of the compartment, and my mother wound up on the other half sandwiched between two elderly gentlemen who actually wore the sorts of fedoras one expects to find in the pages of a Graham Greene novel.

  They spoke a little English and my mother spoke a little Spanish, and I remember that the three of them were having a grand old time when I fell asleep. More important, my mother and father decided in the dining car over breakfast--a dining car with white linen as crisp as any I'd seen at my grandmother's, and doilies that were just as ornate--that henceforth we were going to be free of the tour, and we were going to discover Spain and Portugal on our own. We would not see as much, but what we saw we would see with some depth. And though my mother did not have the opportunity to sleep with additional men on that trip, as a family we were transported far from our original notions of what we should see and where we would go.

  This is, in my mind, the essence of recreational travel: freedom. (The essence of business travel is, of course, just the opposite. Business travel is all about restrictions, logistics, and connections; about seeing how much you can wedge into a sixteen-by-twenty-four-inch carry-on, and how quickly you can conduct your business and get home.)

  William Hazlitt, the nineteenth-century British essayist known today largely, alas, for sleeping with the family maid, observed, "The soul of a journey is liberty."

  If Hazlitt's words have not actually become my mantra when I travel, they certainly reflect with uncanny precision both the joy I experience on the road and the method to my madness. Last year when my wife and I were in Scotland, we missed the benchmark palaces in Edinburgh and Inverness, but we managed instead to stumble across the haunting castle ruins of Dunnottar in the east and Stalker in the northwest.

  Castle Stalker sits on an island no more than two acres square, perhaps a quarter mile into Loch Linnhe. It is uninhabited now, but on the shore is a railroad track that disappears straight into the water. We caught a glimpse of one of the castle's towers while traveling in our rental car behind a bus on a narrow coast road; the bus continued on, but we turned around. We asked permission of the man who lived in the house on the shore to cut through his property (the gate for his sheep was temperamental, he warned us), and followed the tracks to the pebbly beach opposite the medieval castle's remains. We picnicked there, alone on the shore with the view of the fortress to ourselves.

  Dunnottar is more of an archaeological restoration project than a standing castle, but the cliff-side remains--enshrouded by the sort of soupy fog for which Scotland is justifiably famous--are well marked (including the dungeon, which was actually aboveground and offered a fine view of the North Sea if you didn't mind spending your life stooped to about half your height).

  There I met a Scotswoman who loved the United States. "Someday I hope to meet someone from Seattle," she said. "I love that TV show Frasier, and that cute little dog they named Eddie."

  The truth is that whenever my wife and I travel for pleasure, we travel with a limited itinerary at best. When we drive that great American Mother Road west, Route 66--as we have three times, because my wife is a photographer--we know that we will start in Chicago and we will arrive in Santa Monica, California, nine or ten or eleven days later, but other than that we've little idea where we will be on any given day.

  Our favorite trips have always been like that: They are journeys in the best sense of the word, in which every morning is a mystery and each afternoon a surprise. One night we are in Shamrock, Texas, with its ribbon of old road and ceaselessly optimistic boosters who believe that someday the panhandle will indeed become a beckoning gateway to the Lone Star State. Another night we are in Kingman, Arizona, with its views of the stark Hualapai Mountains to the west, a range that grows salmon-colored at sunset, with a glorious yellow halo skirting the peaks.

  Likewise--and this has become very important to us--no one else knows exactly where we are, either, which further deepens the sense that we are, for a change, untethered.

  Grown-ups, of course, aren't supposed to feel untethered. Perhaps teenagers and college students are when they backpack across Europe with their Eurail passes. Perhaps hikers are when they take on the Appalachian Trail. But not adults who have careers, mortgages, and life insurance.

  This is precisely, however, one of the greatest pleasures that travel can offer: the opportunity to experience emotions that are, figuratively as well as literally, foreign. Certainly it demands a willingness to suspend our compulsive desires for order and exactitude, and the security that comes with a guaranteed room with a guaranteed rate. And, yes, there have been times when I would have given a great deal for the security of a reservation at a Holiday Inn.

  But more times than not I have savored the generous, unpredictable satisfactions that come with seat-of-the-pants travel. Suddenly the bills and the deadlines seem very far away, and there is only the altogether delectable rediscovery of what it is like to see a horizon grown boundless.

  Chapter 2.

  FLIRTATIOUS MINNIE PULLS UP

  HER HEM

  AFTER VISITING MY father this winter, my family and I went to Disney World. There I survived the most astonishing ride on the planet--the amazing "Dad's Empty Wallet," in which every credit card instantly reaches its limit--and then had the surprising experience of discovering that Minnie Mouse had a crush on me. The evidence was overwhelming.

  First of all, wherever I went, Minnie was there. One day in particular stands out. My wife, my daughter, and I began the morning in the Magic Kingdom, and Minnie approached us near Goofy's roller-coaster. We had lunch at Disney's MGM Studios, and Minnie sashayed over to our table. And when we were leaving the park in the evening, she appeared out of nowhere from a faux movie set and descended upon us once more.

  In between these three encounters, she seemed to be nearby all the time. We would see her constantly: on the stage by Cinderella's castle, strolling through Main Street U.S.A., signing autographs at a park entrance.

  "How did Minnie get here?" my five-year-old daughter asked my wife when we saw Minnie moments apart in two separate corners.

  "She's stalking your father," my wife said. When our daughter looked confused, she quickly explained, "She has a crush on Daddy."

  "No, she does not!" our daughter insisted. "I've seen her kiss Mickey a thousand times, and I've never seen her kiss Daddy."

  That evening when our daughter was asleep, I told my wife that it was possible we were seeing Minnie so often because there was more than one Minnie. Maybe, I hinted, it was sort of like that Santa Claus thing in the weeks before Christmas.

  "Don't be naive," my wife said, her voice on the verge of deep slumber. "There's only one Minnie."

  "In that case, maybe it's just our imagination," I suggested. "Maybe she's not really trailing us."

  "We'll see," my wife yawned.

  And the next day we did. We saw Mickey's better half everywhere. My wife counted five separate Minnie sightings and five different outfits.

/>   "She's pulling out every dress in her closet for your father," my wife said to our daughter.

  "She's pulling them out for Mickey," my daughter replied indignantly.

  That night we went to dinner at a Disney World hotel where Minnie would be dining. We confirmed our suspicions: The mouse, who's supposed to have set her big, unblinking, plastic eyes on no one other than Mickey, is a vamp. She may even be a trollop. A harlot. A flirt.

  At the very least, however, for one weekend she had a crush on me.

  The indications? When she came to our restaurant table that night, her bloomers were showing, extending a good two inches below one of her trademark red skirts.

  "Your underwear's showing," my wife said to her. (Our daughter couldn't believe that her mother would say such a thing to the mouse and offered the sort of embarrassed, anti-parent death gaze that she will use well as an adolescent.)

  Did Minnie discreetly shield her bloomers? Nope. She pulled up her dress by the hem and revealed even more. "I think you're paying way too much attention to my husband," my wife told her.

  Minnie tried to play coy, but she never stopped smiling. She wrapped her white-gloved paws around my chest, dipped her dinner-plate-sized ears against my retreating hairline, and gave me a very big kiss.

  All the next day--our last in the Kingdom--we watched Minnie's eyes whenever we saw her, but she had made her point and her eyes never moved.

  Mickey, however, had better start opening his.

  Chapter 3.

  MIDLIFE CRISIS RESULTS IN TAKING PART IN THE WEENIE TRIATHLON

  This column appeared nine months before New Hampshire's "Old Man of the Mountain" collapsed. I've no idea whether the triathlon's sponsors will continue to refer to this event as the "Race to the Face," or whether they will use the more precise "Race to the Place Where There Used to be a Face." I thought my young nephew might be on to something when he suggested christening it simply the "Race to the Neck."

  SOMETIMES YOU SEE middle-aged men who are as sensible and wise as Ward Cleaver or Cliff Huxtable, but the truth is that most of the time you are seeing them on television. "Middle-aged man" is actually the Latin term for "Male of the species who does not vacuum and believes Mick Jagger actually looks pretty good for a guy his age."

  Middle-aged men usually have at least one completely senseless and unwise interest, and the rest of their family can only hope it is something as benign as a sudden passion for Civil War re-enactment or taking a second mortgage on the house to buy a two-seater Nissan 350Z.

  My current senseless and unwise interest is the Top Notch Triathlon, a triathlon held the first Saturday in August in Franconia, New Hampshire. Nicknamed the "Race to the Face" because of the course's proximity to New Hampshire's "Old Man of the Mountain," the competition is actually a pretty weenie triathlon. It consists of a seven-mile bike ride--though every mile is uphill, and some of those miles are uphill and in the woods--a swim across the frozen slush of Echo Lake, and a two-and-a-half-mile run up the ski trails on Cannon Mountain.

  My sense is that it was specifically designed for pathetic middle-aged people whose exercise consists usually of reaching under the couch for the remote, or carrying in from the car those hefty two-liter bottles of Pepsi and family-size bags of Doritos. Its slogan sums up the attitude of most participants pretty well: "The Race to the Face is tough, but it's easier than growing up."

  Last year one of my wife's three sisters participated in the triathlon as one-third of a female team, and convinced my brother-in-law and me to start a team and join the race this year. She thought it would either be great fun to have us around her, or we'd both die of exertion and she'd stop having to share her sisters with us.

  My sister-in-law, I should note, had a great time because she was on a team that came in second to last. She was the swimmer on the group, and by the time she dove into the lake the other participants were already huffing their way up Cannon Mountain, and the only people left cheering from the shore were her extended family. She had the whole lake to herself.

  I'm actually not sure how her team managed to overtake one of the teams ahead of her. Maybe someone was eaten by a bear on the mountain.

  In any case, what might save my brother-in-law's and my team from complete athletic ignominy next month is that my wife agreed to be the swimmer. I will bike, my brother-in-law will claw his way up the ski trails, and my wife will keep us in competition by swimming Echo Lake. She's always been a pretty good swimmer because she swims three mornings a week at the Mount Abraham High School pool, but over the last few months she's started to take her swimming more seriously.

  This means that she has been buying lots of new Speedo bathing suits--which brings me back to why I have become so focused on the Top Notch Triathlon. Sure, I'm biking a little more than usual, and recently I even picked up a second pair of bike shorts for the big day. But my real interest has been in helping my wife choose her training suits. I have been a vocal and articulate proponent of the argument that the less material there is in her Speedo, the better her time will be in the water.

  And because my wife knows that the only prayer our team has of not coming in last is her speed in the lake, by that first Saturday in August I should have her down to the official Speedo race thong.

  Yes, we middle-aged men might have interests that are senseless and unwise . . . but at least we are predictable.

  Chapter 4.

  RICE PUDDING AND FRENCH EDITOR HELP NOVICE CYCLIST SURVIVE

  EIGHT DAYS AGO I survived the "Race to the Face," the first triathlon in which I was a participant.

  As a brief recap for those readers who are not related to me by blood and therefore do not begin and end their Sundays with this column: I have been biking with some earnestness this year, because I was going to be one-third of a team in last week's Top Notch Triathlon in Franconia, New Hampshire. I would bike the seven miles uphill toward Franconia Notch, my wife would swim the alpine slush of Echo Lake, and my brother-in-law from Manhattan would run, walk, and--if necessary--crawl his way up to the top of Cannon Mountain.

  I must confess, I didn't think a seven-mile bike ride would be all that difficult, even though it was uphill and almost half in the woods. After all, I'd been biking two and three times a week to the top of the Lincoln Gap.

  Well, as a friend of mine says, "I was wrong before. I'm smarter now."

  I started in the first wave of 150 cyclists (the second wave a mere two minutes behind us), and there were moments in even the first three miles in which I felt like an ailing jalopy in an interstate breakdown lane while high-performance sports cars zoomed past me. I used up so much energy trying to be competitive in the first half of the race that when I reached the portion in the woods I seriously considered pretending to be a bear and going into an early hibernation.

  By the time I dismounted my bike in the transition area and handed off the wristband to my wife so she could embark upon her swim, I looked like one of the living dead from the George Romero horror movies about corpses that refuse to stay buried. Witnesses tell me that I did not exactly race with elan down to the lake to watch my wife swim, but rather staggered there in slow motion, bobbing and weaving like a drunk. My skin, I gather, was the color of craft paste.

  Nevertheless I survived, and I survived in part because during the thirty-six hours before the race I had a personal trainer: My sister-in-law's French editor, Jose Sanchez, happened to be visiting the country and staying with my mother-in-law in New Hampshire. When he was younger, Sanchez used to ride in professional bike races, and he was a cyclist whose specialty was taking on hills.

  Though he couldn't speak a whole lot of English and I couldn't speak a whole lot of French (Translation? None), through my bilingual sister-in-law he offered to discuss the number of teeth in my gears (I hadn't a clue), and which gears to use on which parts of the hills (I suggested hitching my bike to a truck and being pulled). We agreed I'd have rice pudding for breakfast, which he said was a part of many cyclists
' pre-race fare.

  And then on the day of the race itself, he learned two words of English to share with me as I stretched: "Work hard."

  I did. Our team came in thirtieth out of sixty teams, sneaking (barely) into the top half thanks in large measure to my wife's exertion in the lake and my brother-in-law's grit on the mountain. I shaved eight minutes off my best time on my training runs, though this effort did mean that I walked like a cowboy for days and my bike looked like it had been hit by a car.

  Incidentally, other Vermonters were astonishing, including triathlete Jim McIntosh, also of Lincoln. McIntosh--who actually commutes to work via bicycle over the Lincoln Gap--placed eleventh overall, and had the best time in the forty-plus age group.

  Will I do this triathlon again next year? You bet. I may have been in need of a walker when I was done with my portion, but in some ways I'd never felt better: confident, healthy, and not a little proud.

  And I even discovered that I liked rice pudding for breakfast.