Life is a Trip (4 page)

The Crocs and the cold weren’t my only problems. Give me flat terrain and I can walk until the Messiah comes. But add a steep i
n
cline, and some exercise-activated asthma gnomes slow me to a crawl. There were hills on Quirpon. It was a “bear climbed over the mou
n
tain” sort of island; you climbed up one hill and there was another. And on and on. If you were Ed, a mountain goat, you could get off the boat at 5:30, run over the hills, and arrive at the lighthouse in thirty-five minutes, just in time for supper. If you were I, you probably wouldn’t arrive until dessert or brandy.

Did I forget to mention black biting things? I’d killed off dozens before I’d made it up the first hill and they lay ugly and dead, where they met their untimely end—on my neck, scalp, and forehead. I had forgotten to pack bug spray. I didn’t think no-see-ums or mosquitoes, or whatever they were, flew that far north.

I was cold, bitten, panting, and trying not to slide in my treadless Crocs. Ed was whistling and cheerfully telling local tales of murders and suicides, people stranded and having their limbs lopped off to avoid gangrene. I tried to douse my imagination, which was on fire.

If my grandmother had been the type who baked sponge cake, this is how it would have felt underfoot if I had walked on it. The terrain on Quirpon Island wasn’t exactly bog. More like springy lichen. It was quite unlike any other su
r
face I’d ever experienced, e
x
cept briefly in the Canadian Arctic, when I was so cold I wore seven layers of clothes and I couldn’t appreciate the subtlety beneath my four pairs of socks and hiking boots. My Crocs sank in, my Crocs came out. Up. Down. Up. Down. If it had been flat, I would have bounced my way to the lighthouse. But since it was impossible to bounce uphill, I proceeded like a Slinky for the first hour.

“How much longer?” I asked Ed, feeling like a six-year-old in the back of a car that daddy was driving.

“Well, it could be some more hours,” Ed replied. Ignoring my barely su
p
pressed panic, he bent over, plucked some golden berries and proffered them to me. “These are bake apples,” he said. “Also called cloudberries.”

“I don’t suppose they’re covered in moose shit or anything?” I asked.

“Nope. No moose on Quirpon Island.”

“Elk?”

“Not a chance. You might encounter some birds or mink, but cross my heart, no mink shit either.”

I ate one bake apple, then two. They were soft and sweet, melting evenly on the palate.

Next came blueberries, then partridgeberries. And, as I savored them, Ed pointed out large purple fireweeds, purple-stemmed aster, bluebells, black cro
w
berries, and bunchberries (also called crackerbe
r
ries), which made up the Quirpon ground cover.

Every time Ed introduced me to a different weed or flower, I had an excuse to pause and shore up my breath for the next hill. Two and a half hours after dise
m
barking from the boat, we arrived at the ligh
t
house. I was secretly proud of myself for braving the cold, crumbling Crocs, mud, wind, and hills. As the three graces who run the ligh
t
house keeper’s house served a traditional Jigg’s Dinner (made of beef, potato, turnip, peas porridge, and cabbage), I settled in and decided I was g
o
ing to like Ed’s island.

Until the next day. A cold wind that blew no one any good came howling in, the sky was Porta-Potty gray, and it began to rain. I selected a book from Ed’s l
i
brary and dug in. Ed, who is a voracious reader, suggested I might want to have a look at the picture-book-pretty-white-trimmed-with-red lighthouse and the area around it.

The next thing I knew, I had borrowed a jacket and moose hide gloves and was hiking. I scampered over some rocks and kept clim
b
ing higher and higher until I could see out over the ocean where whales swam and icebergs often spend a few weeks or a month. It began to rain. My aging Crocs were slipping and sliding. Suddenly Ed appeared, leaping over the rocks, wearing nothing more than shorts and a T-shirt. Without saying anything, he held out an arm. I grabbed it so hard I almost separated it from its socket. And, just like that, oblivious to the rain, wind, cold, and mud, Ed helped me over the rain-lashed rocks, whistling merrily as I inched along.

I kept thinking that Ed must have moods. No one can be that relentlessly cheery and helpful. If you want a book, some information, a special drink, or food, Ed provides it. Effortlessly. I leaned forward to see if there were gnash marks on his teeth or if his brow was furrowed. Nothing.

“Want to climb up the lighthouse?” Ed asked.

Hmm. I did want to go to the top, but it was that damn climbing thing again. And cold. And dark. I wondered if I could do it.

“Just don’t fall in the hole,” Ed laughed as he unlocked the ligh
t
house door and ushered me inside. Then he disappeared.

When I got to the top, I gazed through the window of the lighthouse and saw Ed. He was running over his island, maybe going to fetch something or perhaps for exercise or the sheer joy of the run.

The last day I was in Newfoundland, I mentioned to Ed that I was interested in learning more about Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a swashbuckling do
c
tor/preacher/artist/writer/humanitarian who, in 1892, had brought medical care and social services to the folks who had neither in Labrador and Newfoundland. He empowered women to start a co
t
tage industry with their skills of hooking rugs and producing crafts. He yanked fishermen from the clutches of merchants who kept them d
e
pendent and impoverished, and he taught the fishermen to form their own cooperatives. He braved ice and storms, traveled by dogsled, slept in snow, and risked his life to help impecunious fishermen and natives. Once, stranded on ice with his dogsled, he had to kill his beloved dogs and use their fur to survive the frigid weather. With their bones, he built a flagpole to signal his distress. Later, he erected a monument to them.

Shortly after I mentioned Sir Grenfell, Ed pressed a book about the doctor into my hands.

“I’m afraid I can’t get it back to you before I leave,” I told him.

“No worry,” he assured me. “You can read it during the water taxi crossing.”

Later that afternoon, I took a water taxi from Woody Point to Norris Point in scenic Gros Morne National Park. Although I loved loo
k
ing at the little shoreline towns with their colorful clotheslines and white churches trimmed in black, I opened the book and damn if I didn’t finish it by the time the water taxi reached the shore. I’d been speed-reading for less than twenty minutes, and, as Ed had predic
t
ed, I’d completed the thin volume.

I was at the Lobster Cove Head lighthouse in Norris Point, waiting for Ed to pick me up after I’d attended a rug-hooking workshop, when I mentioned to a park ranger that I knew Ed and he was the most go
n
zo guy I had encountered in eons.

“The secret about Ed,” the ranger said, “is that he makes you believe you can do anything.”

That was it. She had articulated what it was about Ed that made me hike, climb, brave the elements, and read at lightning speed. He treated me as though there were no doubt I could do anything. No fuss. No discussion. He smiled, whi
s
tled, held out a hand. It was obvious I was going to do the things Ed suggested, and I did them.

A few months later, I was with a friend who had recently pu
b
lished a book and she was invited to speak about it and her life at a conference. She couldn’t sleep or eat; she’d worked herself into a frenzy of fear, inadequacy, and public performance panic.

“I know I’ll screw up,” she kept saying. “Even if I write it all out—and I hate it when other speakers do that—I’ll lose my place. I’ll look ridiculous. No one will want to buy my book.”

I smiled inwardly as I thought of Ed.

“When you told me about how you wrote plays as a kid and performed them for yourself in front of a mirror, I thought it was touching and charming,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course. I especially loved the details about how you raided your mother’s and sister’s closets and dressed up for the show.”

“I almost strangled myself wrapping my sister’s boas around my neck. And I stuffed a pair of socks in my mother’s shoes because they were so big. Do you think I could start my talk with that?”

I grinned. She was off and running. And we never had to discuss whether she could or couldn’t do it. I had pulled an Ed English. Thank you, Ed.

T
he first time I went to San Antonio de Aguas Calientes
in the Highlands of Guatemala, my heart ripped open as though it had been held shut by Velcro all my life.

I had hopped on a “chicken bus” in Antigua, Guatemala. If heaven were in Central America, the angels would hang out in Antigua. Nestled in the lap of Agua (water) and Fuego (fire) volcanoes, paved with cobblestones, do
t
ted with churches that look like ornate and sugary wedding cakes, home to la
n
guage schools, a posh h
o
tel in a converted monastery, restaurants, and shop opps for the most meager to the most lavish budgets, Antigua is the languid dream of every traveler who wants to bathe in beauty while surrounded by bu
b
bles of exotic and fascinating culture.

At the edge of town is a depot where gaily-painted old school buses wait for the onslaught of locals who drag groceries, vegetables, and live chickens on board to transport them to their villages.

I randomly selected a bus and found, to my delight, that it was packed with Maya people who were going home after a day of work, selling, trading, bartering, or shopping in Antigua.

A trained eye can tell which village a Maya person comes from by the clothing he wears. The women wear brilliantly colored, intricately woven and designed
huipiles
or sleeveless tops. According to a woman who sat on the bus with two chickens in a bag on her lap, the ones I found most appealing came from San A
n
tonio de Aguas Calientes. Furthermore, she informed me, our bus was stopping there, and she’d be happy to tell me when we arrived.

We chatted for about half an hour as Maya people got on and off the bus. I loved the way they looked—small, with large eyes, mocha skin, thick, black hair and open faces. They had been through the ho
r
rors of colonialism, war, massacres, and violence of every stripe, yet they still were friendly and approachable.

I got off the chicken bus next to a seventeenth-century baroque church and saw a sign pointing to a shop that sold textiles. The door was closed and, when I knocked, it was opened by a diminutive woman. For me to call another person “diminutive” is no ordinary occu
r
rence. When I stand up straight, I am five feet tall, so I would estimate that the woman was about four feet eight, give or take a few inches.

She greeted me in her native Cakchiquel and explained to me in Spanish (I u
n
derstood a few word clusters here and there) that I was standing in a women’s te
x
tile cooperative. Most or all of the women were widowed and they survived by weaving the placemats, tabl
e
cloths, handbags, men’s and women’s clothes, belts, and huipiles I saw on the walls and display tables around me.