The Best Women's Travel Writing (15 page)

I thanked her but told her I didn't want to know.

I walked back to Michael's room. His legs were elevated to help the cells travel to his brain.

“I already feel better,” he told me.

I wheeled him to the foyer. In the living room, one of the girls with cerebral palsy sat on Dr. White's lap, her head resting on his chest. When he saw us, he gently laid the girl in her father's arms.

“Your eyes are clearer,” Dr. White said as he patted Michael's shoulder. “Your posture is better.”

“Well, I'm still shaking,” Michael said.

“Oh God, give me a break. I'm not Jesus, the healer.”

Dr. White handed me his business card. “You might not see any results for six months. But keep me posted at all times.”

“You look good, Michael. Doesn't he look good?” Dr. White said, turning to his staff.

I felt uneasy. Was he Jesus or wasn't he? Was it all a hoax?

The driver took us back to the hotel. Michael was starving. In the hotel restaurant, he ate lasagna and I ate
la bandera
, a dish that symbolized the Dominican flag, with red pinto beans alongside white rice, stewed meat, and plantains.

In the morning, we flew out before dawn. I didn't practice my usual travel tricks to prolong the experience—standing outside to soak up the last rays of tropical sunshine, buying the local hot sauce or a CD of some unknown steel drum band in the airport terminal. Anything to hold on a little longer. No. This time I let the country slip right through my fingers. A souvenir would only remind me of life's inequities.

We landed in Milwaukee as the sun set. On the way to his apartment, I was thinking about what was happening inside Michael's body, whether the new cells were multiplying like they were supposed to or just floating around without purpose. Michael, on the other hand, was thinking about bridges. He told me that the ramparts built to support bridges were supposed to last thirty years, but salting icy roads made them start to crumble after only ten. I wanted to know this man, but I wondered if I could, if I could ever get to the heart of who he was.

In his apartment, I noticed for the first time a drawing framed and hanging on the living room wall. I asked him about it, and he told me he'd seen a man at a hamburger joint sketching him.

“I thought that was really interesting,” Michael said. “I offered him $20 for it and he said no, just take it. So I gave him $10 and he took it. The only thing is he drew me without any eyes.”

He was shaking, and now I was shaking, too.

I made Michael a sandwich and thought
but he does have eyes
, clear and blue, and capable of seeing a life beyond the one he has. Perhaps this was the miracle—that a chronically underachieving, socially isolated misfit who could barely walk or feed himself still had hope, still believed a miracle might be possible.

I told my brother I loved him, and I left to go back home.

Carol Reichert writes in the sensory deprivation chamber that is the Newton, Massachusetts, public library. She has been a midwife to a cow giving birth in New Zealand, danced flamenco in the mountain caves outside Granada, and learned lomi lomi massage in Hawaii. In addition to writing, she dances flamenco in Boston and Spain whenever the rhythm moves her. She is currently working on a memoir about her family's life in a village in southern Spain.

CATHERINE WATSON

Climbing Vaea

A traveler on a trail to remember.

P
ilgrimages,'' I reminded myself, as I struggled over yet another fallen tree, “aren't supposed to be easy.''

But I had thought this one would be. I had gone to the South Seas to meet Robert Louis Stevenson on his own turf—to see the spacious house that was the author's last home and walk the path up to his gravesite, on the top of his favorite mountain.

The flaw in that fantasy was “walk.'' You do not
walk
to the top of Mt. Vaea, especially not in the rainy season.

The trail was buried in a maze of fallen trees, so big and so close together that the hillside looked like a log jam. Their own weight had brought them crashing down, their roots pulling loose as frequent rains turned Samoa's volcanic soil to slippery muck.

And here they lay—a jumble of branches; leaves in various stages of withering; tangles of jagged roots, and huge, huge trunks caught at angles like oversized Pick Up Sticks.

With a few, there was space to wriggle under; another few let me squirm through their wilting crowns, but with most, my only choice was to crawl over them.

Make that “throw myself on them as if they were horses”—pull myself up, flop belly-first over the trunk, then roll, skid, slide, or jump off the other side. Or fall. I did that too, a couple of times.

Stevenson had been one of my life-long heroes—not because of
Treasure Island
or
Kidnapped
—but because he was a great traveler and a prolific travel writer. I'd particularly liked his accounts of sailing around the South Pacific—voyages that had led both of us to Vailima.

“I travel not to go anywhere,'' he'd once written, “but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” That became my mantra too.

So did another of his classics: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.'' Stuck on the side of his mountain, I was no longer so sure about that.

I could have turned around, but that would have meant the same struggle going back, with nothing to show for it except torn skin, sore muscles, and muddy clothes. Besides, I couldn't believe the trail could stay this bad all the way up to the grave.

I was wrong about that, too.

During Stevenson's life, there was no path at all, though he managed to climb to the top of Vaea and see its magnificent view over the green slopes that run down to Apia, Samoa's small capital, and the blue sea beyond.

Samoa was Stevenson's last stop in the Pacific, the place that the Scottish-born writer finally called home after years of wandering. In 1890, helped by an American entrepreneur, Stevenson bought more than 300 acres of forested land south of Apia, and he and his American-born wife, Fanny Osbourne, set about building what is still a grand house at the foot of Mt. Vaea.

Or rather, she did. Ten years older than her husband, strong where he was fragile, Fanny served as general contractor, overseeing construction of the big, veranda-wrapped bungalow they called Villa Vailima.

Working side by side with Samoans she hired, Fanny put in vegetable and flower gardens, planted fruit trees, and cultivated cocoa, making her a pioneer in modern Samoa's chocolate industry.

She was also her husband's protector, “a violent friend,'' as one of her biographers called her. She cleared the way for him to write, relax, and rebound from the illnesses that had plagued him since childhood.

He was barely forty when they arrived but already world famous, thanks to novels that included
Treasure Island
and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, as well as travel books, essays, and myriad poems.

Stevenson wrote a dozen more books in the four short years he lived here, took sides in local politics, and was much revered—still is—by the Samoan people. They called him Tusitala, the Teller of Tales. He died at forty-four, probably of a brain hemorrhage, while helping Fanny make dinner one December evening at Vailima.

People told me the name of the place came from two Samoan words—
vai
for water and
lima
for hand—and that it referred to a stream, a pool, and a local legend.

The details of the legend varied with the speaker, but it concerned a traveler (or aged father or tired wife) who became thirsty, and a traveling companion (or dutiful son or loving husband) who fetched life-giving water in cupped hands.

Legend aside, everyone agreed that Stevenson himself had swum in the shaded, stream-fed pool at the foot of the mountain. Both trails to the top started just beyond it—the short, steep, “hard'' one, which I'd shunned, and the longer, gradual, “easy'' one, which I couldn't imagine being worse.

Now, an hour into this mistake, I was out of drinking water, there were no friendly hands in sight, and I kept losing the trail. I was also starting to panic.

No one in Samoa knew where I'd gone, and if I got stuck or fell or broke an ankle, it would be a long time before anybody came looking. I tried yelling for help then; the only answer was a dog barking, far in the distance. I went back to climbing logs.

Hope eventually appeared in the form of tourist trash—the discarded sole of a sandal, lying in the weeds. The spoor of my kind, I thought, grateful for garbage. Farther on, I found a plastic bottle. Then the wrapper from a packet of Kleenex. Finally, the sole of the other sandal.

And then I was—not on top—but at least out of the woods. A Samoan family was already up there, beside the plain white concrete tomb—three little boys and their mother and grandfather. They were just starting down in my direction. Obviously they thought my trail would be easier.

I burst out of the foliage, waving my arms and screaming, “No, No! Don't go down this way! No!” I must have looked like a crazy woman; I certainly felt like one. We took pictures of each other beside the tomb before they heeded my advice and went back down the “hard'' trail, the way they'd come.

The gravesite felt private then. I sat down on the edge of the tomb, read and re-read the famous words on its bronze plaque, and started to cry—as if I'd known the man, as if the loss were fresh. It was Stevenson's own epitaph that made me weep:

Fanny Stevenson died in California twenty years later, but her ashes were brought back to Samoa and interred with her husband's, as she'd wished, under a tribute he'd once written for her:

I took the “hard'' trail down, the steep one that grieving Samoans had cut right after Stevenson died so they could carry his body to the mountaintop. It wasn't littered with tree trunks, but in places it was nearly vertical.

It felt like the last run of the day on a ski slope, when you're so tired you lose control, and sure enough, I did fall—hard—trying to hug a tree as my feet slid away. At least that tree was upright.

The heavy air coalesced into rain. By the time I got back to the trailhead, it was pelting down, but I was too sweat-soaked to care. It cooled me, actually—made me feel cleansed, as if I'd swum in Stevenson's pool myself, in the lovely glen where Vailima's waters gathered.

It's true that pilgrimages aren't supposed to be easy, but neither is the way they end. Even hardship doesn't prepare you for that. I mean, what do you do after you reach your Everest?

I just walked back to the main road, bought a two-liter bottle of cold water at a tiny grocery shack and drank half of it without stopping to breathe. Then I flagged down one of the island's gaily-painted ex-school buses, rode it into central Apia and trudged back to my hotel room for dry clothes.

Only later did I celebrate—at Aggie Grey's, a legendary and expensive hostelry that looks like a set from “South Pacific.'' I went into Aggie's air-conditioned bar, pulled up a stool, ordered a bottle of the local beer—fittingly, the brand name is Vailima—and drank a toast to the Teller of Tales.

Home is the hunter
, I thought.

Catherine Watson is a travel writer, editor, photographer, and writing coach who teaches university-level workshops in the U.S. and Europe. She intended to become an archeologist until she spent a college summer on a dig in the Middle East. Since then, her career has taken her to more than one hundred countries and her writing has appeared in a dozen anthologies. Her books include
Roads Less Traveled
—
Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth,
and
Home on the Road—Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth
. Her website is
www.catherinewatsontravel.com
.