The Best Women's Travel Writing (11 page)

“Greg will let you go?” Angela was concerned. She relinquished the luxury of pursuing her dreams when she married and had two children.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

Doreen helped me pack, carefully handing me carabiners, pulleys, and my river knife.

“I know you will be careful, my sister,” she said, smiling proudly. “Are you afraid of the rapids?”

“Not so much the rapids,” I said. By now, I had guided Class III and IV rapids in Wyoming, Idaho, and California. “I'm more scared of the hippos and crocs.”

Doreen erupted in a deep, carefree laugh. “Only tell them that I have sent you. They will not harass you then.”

Greg drove me to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, to board a train for Harare, where I was to catch a flight for Addis Ababa. With time to spare before the night train departed, we ducked into a matinee of “The Power of One.” We came out of the movie misty-eyed from its message of racial equality and being true to oneself, only to find we had been robbed. My bag filled with river gear was missing, as was the guard we had paid to watch our Rover.

We went to the central police station to report the crime. When it was my turn at the counter, I slid my passport over to the officer on duty.

“My duffel bag was stolen from our vehicle,” I began.

“Oho,” he raised his eyebrows and loudly flipped through the stamped pages of my passport. “And tell me, who is speaking for you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Who is reporting the crime for you? Who is speaking for you?”

“I'm speaking for myself,” I said, bewildered.

“No, no. You must have someone to speak for you—a husband, father, or brother. Otherwise, you cannot report it.”

“Here's my boyfriend …” I offered.

“Sorry. He is not your husband.”

“But, my father and brothers are in the States.”

“Well, that is truly unfortunate, then. It is Zimbabwean law that a woman must have someone speaking for her to report a crime. Next in the queue,” he handed back my passport, looking over my shoulder, no longer seeing me.

Stripped of my river armor—life jacket, helmet, knife, throw bag, wrap kit—I felt vulnerable and ill-prepared for guiding a fourteen-day trip on a remote wilderness river near the Sudan border.

“What a bummer,” Greg said, as we took our seats at a neighboring bar. “You were really looking forward to going.”

I was tempted to numb my disappointment with a Cane and Coke, lean my head on Greg's comfortable shoulder, and head back to Livingstone. I could nearly taste the cocktail's sugary oblivion. Then I remembered Doreen beaming at me as I left, her compact, sturdy arms waving madly from the gate.

“Oh, I'm still going,” I said, and ordered a Fanta.

“But you don't even have a lifejacket,” Greg pointed out.

“Yeah, but I've got a ticket.”

I boarded the plane as scheduled, bolstering myself with the knowledge that I had been chosen for this—been handed my dream-come-true—and there might never be another chance. I flew to Addis intent on holding those coveted oars, Doreen's proud smile nudging me forward the entire way.

When Greg asked me to marry him three years later, I began to cry. I told him they were tears of joy. The truth was that off the river, I still lacked the courage to jump into the stream of my own life.

We were married five years when I finally poured out my last bottle of whiskey, and all of my excuses along with it. I loaded my truck, leaving behind a rafting business, a house, and a good man. I packed only two things: my river gear and a very large handwoven basket.

I remembered Angela's parting words when I left Zambia for the last time: “Tell me, friend, how are we to be content, never seeing you or speaking to you again?” She didn't know that nearly a decade later, she would still be speaking to me, that the shackled aspirations of my Zambian sisters would speak clearly to me—and for me—as I headed toward the western horizon and freedom. The steering wheel firmly in my hands, I drove on, undeterred. Not because I had to, but because I could.

Bridget Crocker is an adventure guide, outdoor travel writer, and mother. She has led remote river expeditions and guided first descents down many of the world's greatest river canyons in far-flung regions of Zambia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, India, and the Western United States. She is a contributing author to Lonely Planet guidebooks and the outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, and her work has been featured in
The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011
and magazines such as
National Geographic Adventure, Trail Runner, Paddler
, and
Outside.
Bridget lives on the edge of the continent in Southern California with her husband and two daughters and writes about her family's adventures on her blog, The Adventures of Little Mama. Read more of her work at
www.bridgetcrocker.com
.

MARCY GORDON

Root-Bound

Tangled in a web of roots, she is undone by Italian hospitality.

M
y first visit to Sicily was with my mother, when I was fourteen—we were there to look up her Sicilian relatives on the outskirts of Palazzolo Acreide. Although my mother was born in New York, her older brother had lived in Sicily until he was sixteen, so it was through his recollections that she pieced together the location of her ancestral home and the distant cousins who still lived there.

Palazzolo, located well off the tourist track southeast of Siracusa, did not lend itself to casual visitors. At the time of our visit there were no tourist offices or large hotels, just a small square surrounded by a crumbling baroque church, a bakery, and a few cafés. Women in black sat on benches, and groups of men wearing vests and Borsalino hats strolled around the square's perimeter. It appeared no one under the age of fifty-five lived there.

Up to that point, everything I knew about Sicily I learned from reading
The Godfather
. The book was making the rounds at my junior high school—not for its literary merits of course, but for the violence and raunchy sex scenes. An ambitious reader before me had created a Cliff's Notes version of the book by highlighting all the graphic sections, such as the one in which Sonny Corleone bangs Lucy Mancini (a bridesmaid) on his wedding day.
The Godfather
was set mostly in New York, but the Sicily scenes shaped my expectations of what I might find there.

Standing in the square, it felt like we were living a page right out the book.

My mother was a travel writer for our local paper back home, and this wasn't the first time I'd been dragged along on one of her crazy international escapades. As a ten-year-old I'd been smuggled into a nightclub in the Bahamas while she interviewed Peanuts Taylor, the famous bongo drummer, for an article about the maiden voyage of Carnival's first cruise ship, “the Mardi Gras” (although the real story was that shortly after pulling away from the dock, the ship ran aground on a sandbar just outside the Port of Miami). I'd been with her to Haiti, where we visited the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince and learned about Vodou symbolism in the colorful paintings. And when I was twelve, I accompanied her to Cartagena, Colombia, where we toured a plantation that made “vitamins” from coca leaves.

Now it was the 1970s, and Alex Haley's miniseries
Roots
had turned everyone into amateur genealogists.

“We will go to the old country,” she declared, “and find our Sicilian roots.” She pitched the story to her editor, and off we went in search of—as she put it—“our Italian Kunta Kinte.”

“
Mi scusi
,” she said, trying to ask one of the men if he knew the location of the Rizza family farm outside of town. He refused to talk to her, and the women uniformly glared at us. For once, my mother's reporter charm wasn't getting us very far. It seemed we were up against a deeply ingrained suspicion of strangers and might not possess the linguistic skills to bridge the gap. Finally, a woman came out of a bakery and looked at the documents we held. As she drew a crude map and gave it to my mother, I felt like the whole town was watching.

“Should we stay here for lunch?” my mother asked.

“Are you kidding? Let's get going before they shoot us or something.” I was half expecting a black sedan to come screeching around the corner and start firing bullets into the square.

She rolled her eyes and we got back in the car.

The directions led us out of town down several miles of un-maintained roads, past acres of cactus and then olive trees. After about twenty minutes, the road petered out, and my mother stopped the car in front of a modest stone farmhouse. She knocked on the door, clutching the yellowed family photos and the map. A slender young man about nineteen opened the door, and my mother thrust the documents into his face as if he were a customs agent.

“We're here from America!” she shouted.

He immediately shut the door. A minute later, a much older man in a threadbare undershirt who looked like he'd just woken from a nap emerged from the house along with a woman wearing rubber gloves and an apron splotched with red stains. They looked like Italian hillbillies, the Ma and Pa Kettle of Sicily, only more frightening. I imagined dueling banjos playing the theme from
Deliverance
in the background. For a few anxious moments we all just stared at each other. Then my mother pointed out the house in the photo she held. Aside from the trees, which had grown considerably, the house was relatively unchanged. That clinched the deal.

We were ushered into the house and despite our unexpected arrival, put up for the next three days. Their son was banished to the couch, “Ma and Pa” took his room, and we were given their bedroom.

Although my mother knew some Italian, the relatives spoke only in Sicilian dialect. I sat by silently as they struggled to communicate with each other, feeling as if I was watching a foreign film without subtitles. When we arrived, “Ma” had been in the middle of roasting and canning tomatoes, and the house smelled sweet and savory. I couldn't understand her words, but I could interpret that rich wonderful scent in any language.

I still remember the food we ate that weekend. In addition to being a travel writer, my mother also wrote a weekly food column, so I grew up eating what would have been considered exotic at the time—borscht, tagines and curries. Our family dinners were often results of research for her food column, straight out of the test kitchen and onto our plates. Admittedly, the majority of the tests proved unsuccessful.

But here, there was pasta with sardines, fennel, and pine nuts; fried eggplant with ricotta and basil; and
arancini
, the deep-fried rice balls stuffed with tomato ragu, ground beef, mozzarella, and peas—exactly the way my grandmother made them. There was wine drawn from a big glass jug that looked like an office water cooler, and I had my very first taste of grappa.

On Saturday morning I helped Ma finish putting up the tomatoes and later, in the fading afternoon light, we gathered lemons and she showed us how to make
limoncello
. My mother shadowed Ma in the kitchen and took careful notes, thrilled that our trip would yield not just a travel story, but a few food articles too.

On Sunday we all drove to town for Mass at the crumbling church off the square where we'd asked for directions. Just days before we were outsiders—strangers—but now we were celebrities.
Famiglia
! From America!

After Mass I walked in the olive groves with the son. He showed me how they spread out nets to gather the olives, and in broken English asked if he could “scratch my beautiful hair.” I figured he meant touch, not scratch, but my mother and Ma were following close behind, leaving us little opportunity for further cultural exchange under the olive trees.

On the day of our departure, we stood outside the stone house, loaded down with jars of blood orange marmalade, tomato sauce, and bottles of olive oil. As a teenager, it was my job to be sullen and maintain an air of detached boredom, but as we hugged goodbye, my carefully constructed posture of aloofness began to crumble. Their hospitality had pierced me, and I was close to tears.

My mother started writing her “
Roots
” article immediately after we returned home, but it took two weeks before the film from her camera was developed and we could share our photos with my uncle. When the prints arrived, my uncle studied them carefully. He reached the last one, then slowly flipped though them again.

“Mary,” he finally said to my mother, “Who are these people?”

“That's Maria and her husband and son.”

“Who?”

“Cousin Maria!”

“This is not Maria,” he said, shaking his head.

“But this is the house,” said my mother. “Don't you recognize it?”

“I remember this house, I played there as a boy. But our house was farther down the road, past a creek.”

The color drained out of my mother's face. Had we stayed with complete strangers? As she tried to recall the exact conversation with “Cousin Maria” at the door, she realized we'd never really exchanged names. Ma and Pa called each other Mario and Mama, and since she never revealed her real name, we called her Mama too. We'd just been swept up into their home and their lives, no questions asked. Our status as blood relatives was based solely on a dog-eared photo.

I found all of this completely hilarious, but my mother was horrified that the roots she thought were hers belonged to some other tree. We later discovered that cousin Maria and her family had moved to Catania twelve years earlier. Even if we had found the “right” house, our real relatives would have been long gone.

Thirty years later, when my mother was in her seventies, we returned to Sicily to connect with our genuine blood relations in Catania. This time, we were
veramente la famiglia
. True family. Once again we were plied with copious amounts of food and drink, and once again we were given the master bedroom. The experience varied little from our first trip.

Maybe I hadn't been so far off, learning about Sicily by reading the
Godfather
. If only I'd paid more attention to the plot, I would have realized it was actually a story about the enduring bonds of family—regardless of whether you were related by blood. If you presented yourself as loyal to the family, you were accepted as family. Our first trip to Sicily was evidence of that. This time we were connected by blood, but I would always be connected to Ma and Pa by love.

Marcy Gordon's narrative travel writing has appeared online for
World Hum
and in many Travelers' Tales anthologies including
More Sand in My Bra, 30 Days in Italy
and
The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011
and
2010.
She is the editor of
Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana: Funny Travel Stories from the Road
(Travelers' Tales, 2012). She also writes Come for the Wine, a popular blog that features wine tourism destinations around the world. Visit
www.comeforthewine.com
for more information.