When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home (14 page)

I hesitated. “Oh, and if you pick a tree,” he added, “look up and make sure there is nothing in it.”

If someone had told me a week before that I would ask a man I had known for only twelve hours to accompany me to the bathroom, I would have said he was crazy.

I'm not suggesting restrooms in the United States are exactly models for the world. Most of the facilities abroad bear two initials: WC for water closet. You can figure that out. But can you imagine a foreigner coming to our country and trying to figure out the little symbols we use on restroom doors? Even I have trouble with them. There are Senors—Senoritas, Messieurs— Mesdames, Cowboys—Cowgirls, Chiefs—Squaws, Tarzan—Jane.

They get more creative than that. There are pointers and setters, Samson and Delilah, Romeo and Juliet, Scarlett and Rhett.

Ever since my husband found me, sans glasses, with my nose pressed against a restroom door following the outline of a little figure in a hooped skirt with my fingers and asking if that was a skirt or a man wearing a cape, he cases the place first.

I hate the ones named after animals. I'm not good with animals. I'm OK with heifers and steers, stallions and mares, chicks and chicklets. But one night I didn't know the difference between a ram and a ewe. We can never go back to that restaurant again.

At least most American restrooms are free. Many foreign restrooms are not.

In Istanbul, every restroom is guarded by a little old man sitting at a card table who charges you a minimum of 100 lire (about 15 cents) to use an open pit with no paper, no towels, no soap, and no deep breathing.

Recently, I read a story that the Soviets in their move toward capitalism installed their first pay toilet in Moscow not far from Red Square at a charge of 10 kopeks (about 3 cents). That's not a capitalistic moneymaker. Capitalists aren't that cruel or that stupid. You show me a pay toilet in the United States and I will show you a woman in Donna Karan slacks crawling on her stomach under the door to avoid paying 10 cents.

Recently, a couple who were going abroad for the first time visited us. My husband smiled and said, “What luck! Erma keeps a diary. She can probably give you some suggestions on what to see.”

“We'll land in London,” the woman chirped.

I flipped through my notes. “They're called loos, dear. Have chain flushes. Take your own tissue. Will you hit Germany? The restroom by the Rhine was adequate. Roller towel was quite soiled. The one in the department store in West Berlin, however—”

“What have you got on the Eiffel Tower?” she asked, moving closer.

“The Eiffel Tower restroom had soap and tissue, but the lines could throw you into kidney failure. Switzerland had sparkling mirrors and the locks were secure on the doors.”

“Is it true what they say about Italy?”

“Every word,' I said.' ”No paper, graffiti. . ."

The men just stared at us. To them, it's a place to whip in and out. To women, it's half a day out of their lives standing in line and wrestling with cumbersome clothes. It's funny, but men don't question why at public events women have never heard an overture, never seen a curtain rise on the second act, never heard the Star-Spangled Banner, never had the luxury of finding their seats with the lights on. What do they think we do in there? Kill time?

We spent a week in Istanbul, a city that is half Asian, half European. On our return, my husband regaled friends with his boat trip down the Bosphorus, his visit to the Blue Mosque, St. Sophia, and the spice bazaars.

I am still talking about the white marble baroque palace of Dolmabahce. With all that money, don't you think the sultan could have sprung for a real sit-down toilet?

Brochure Speak

Some of the most creative fiction being written today are travel brochures. They rank right up there with Michener and Ludlum.

“Tonight, sit back and enjoy a romantic gondola ride in Venice.” It's the dream that torments and eventually seduces those of us in bumper-to-bumper traffic each morning, drinking coffee out of a foam cup.

We live the fantasy of lying in a boat in the arms of our husbands (who look twenty years younger in the dark) while a gondolier with the voice of Placido Domingo serenades us. There is never a clue that this is the summer when tourists and gondoliers wear face masks to filter out the smell of rotting weeds and polluting algae that kill fish and create an odor that could turn off a nymphomaniac.

In brochures, the motorcoach is always a “luxury” motorcoach, all hotel rooms overlook the bay, large terrace, and gardens, and every restaurant has “old-world ambience.”

The following are phrases that have appeared in travel literature that we bought. . . literally.

“Spacious suites to enjoy as you cruise the Norwegian fjords”

This is accompanied by a picture of a woman in an evening dress sitting at a small table while her husband in a tuxedo pours her a glass of champagne. What the picture doesn't indicate is that they have to hoist the table on the sofa before they can open the door, he is sitting on the toilet seat lid, the room is below the water line, the curtains cover a wall, and they are both trolls.

“Bring extra film to photograph the last remaining Javan rhino recorded by Marco Polo, wild boars, tigers, leaf monkeys, and two hundred species of birds”

Promises, promises. I let a domestic cow slip right out of my camera range. That's too bad because it was the only animal I saw.

“One could easily spend several days visiting the more than eighty-six thousand items on display in the museum”

Which is too bad because the bus will stop for only twenty minutes.

“Latin Americans do not have the same sense of urgency that we from the Northern Hemisphere feel”

Set your alarm for dinner.

“The phrase for 'Bring me drinking water, please' is Lete maji ya tafadhali kunyua”

If I could remember that, I'd be smart enough not to drink the water.

“Leisure afternoon to shop”

This is a contradiction in terms. Shopping is work if you do it right.

“Food for the adventurous”

I could stay home for that.

“Never swim alone if you suspect the presence of sharks”

So what do you do? Buy a friend?

The pitches I really love are the ones that say their tour excursions “aren't for everyone.” There was one ad that offered sixteen days in Zimbabwe on a rhino reconnaissance safari. Another adventure in a brochure read, “White-water rafting on the powerful Zambezi River directly under the spectacular Victoria Falls. Looping low figure eights in a small aircraft over the great gorge to photograph myriad rainbows shining through the mist also available.”

For nearly a year, my husband pored through a brochure of a fishing and wildlife expedition to Alaska. We were going to cruise along with an escort of humpback whales. We were going to see the breeding grounds for fur seals and visit islands rich in waterfowl. Giant king and sockeye salmon would jump in the boat, and bears and moose would line the shores and wave as we cruised by.

He was like a kid who couldn't wait for Christmas.

My eyes kept falling on an ominous “Please note” in small print in the back of the brochure. It read, “Due to the unique areas visited on this expedition, changes in the itinerary may be made where necessary or deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers. Your expedition director is a professional in travel and will ensure that the best alternative is arranged if a change is necessary.”

I got a chill every time I read it.

Alaska

In many ways our salmon fishing expedition in the Bering Sea was a lot like the Broadway production of Josh Logan's Mister Roberts.

The ship sailed from oblivion to tedium with stop-offs at boredom and monotony, the passengers were always five minutes away from mutiny, and the captain actually had a palm tree on the deck outside his door.

Two big differences. The ship was considerably newer than the mythical Navy bucket, the USS Reluctant, and when expedition passengers were “bad” they were threatened with shore leave.

My husband, Mister Roberts, booked us passage on the ship because the very word “expedition” made him crazy. He fantasized he was Marlin Perkins sedating a rhino with a dart gun from a helicopter. In his dreams he became Jacques Cousteau pinned by the winds against the bow of the Calypso cruising into Tahiti. When he really hallucinated, he was Robert Redford between the sheets with Meryl Streep.

My first reaction was that I'd pass this vacation up. “Don't be ridiculous,” he said. “You don't have to fish. You could join the wildlife explorers or the flora and fauna team.”

“They sound like vaudeville acts,” I said.

“Trust me on this one, you are going to have the time of your life. We're not talking a smelly fishing boat here. This is a luxury ship with an exercise room, great cuisine, and whole unstructured days for relaxation.”

On the day our matching red parkas with the insignia on them, the fanny packs, the caps with the bills, and the boots arrived, I thought he was going to pass out from excitement.

I looked at myself in the mirror wearing the full expedition costume. I could barely stand up, let alone move. From the rear, I looked like a Disney parking lot. Ensign Pulver lives.

The trip was doomed from day one. In all fairness, it really wasn't the fault of the organization that gale winds prevented us from boarding the ship at Nome. The residents there opened their hearts and their homes, and even provided tour buses so we could see Nome's only tree barely standing in the winds. The next morning we were bused to Teller.

The ship was anchored offshore and pitched so badly we were literally pulled from the zodiacs and dragged aboard. Social amenities were not exchanged the first night. We all had our heads in the toilets being ill. Over the intercom we were informed that a lifeboat drill would take place in five minutes. Three people showed up. I was not one of them. The doctor was so sick he gave himself only half a shot in the hip so he could still function. Seasickness patches in the backs of the ears could have been costume jewelry for all the good they did.

There was no one upright for the captain to welcome at dinner the first night.

Early the next morning as we still clung to our beds, the intercom made an important announcement. Since so many of us had missed the lifeboat drill the day before, we were advised that any time we heard five bells, it would be a signal to grab for the life jacket and prepare to evacuate ship.

On day two, all of us crawled from our cabins and made a stab at social interaction. It wasn't easy. The ship was literally divided into three distinct interest groups. The wildlife people had binoculars draped around their necks and carried notebooks everywhere. One man told of how he went without his lunch for three years to save enough money to watch a frigate bird perform his courtship ritual. (I worried when they gave him a steak knife.)

The flora and fauna group lugged around cameras with lenses the size of cannons. In their backpacks, they carried coffee-table volumes devoted to flowers and trees.

The fishermen had hooks sticking in their hats and compared lures like little boys with frogs in their pockets.

The brochure had made promises to all three groups. The wildlifers had been promised a plethora of animals: whale, sea otter, and bear sightings. The nature people were along to tramp through rain forest and stalk the Alaska coastline. The fishermen had been guaranteed they would catch more salmon than they could possibly eat in a lifetime.

I have never seen people so driven to their respective special interests in my entire life. At the mere mention of the words “whale sighting,” the dining room would empty and the boat would list to one side. From morning until night, groups gathered in darkened rooms to watch slides of sea lions mating. At breakfast, they filled notebooks with drawings of Indian petroglyphs, and in the lounge at night the sportsmen listened enraptured as diaries of fishing excursions were read.

Every minute of the day, one group or another was being launched in zodiacs to visit a seal rookery, throw in a line, or turn over rocks somewhere.

Have you any idea what it is like to be the only shallow person in the midst of all this? A woman who looked through binoculars and saw only her own eyelash? Who thought that Dolly Varden was a country-and-western singer and that a dark-eyed junco was a description of one of the passengers?

But the sad part about it was that no one was seeing animals, no one was being dazzled by nature's paintbrush, and no one was catching fish. It was as if we were adrift in the twilight zone in a survival experiment.

On the morning of the third or fourth day, I went in search of the exercise room. Following directions from a member of the crew, I cautiously pushed open a small door marked Exercise. There were wall-to-wall mattresses. Two bare-chested crew members, awakened from a sound sleep, snapped, “Whatya want?” I silently closed the door.

That episode brought the Ensign Pulver in me to life. I said to my husband, “Do you know what I am going to do? I'm going to march right into the captain's quarters and push this brochure up his nose and say, 'Listen up, mister . . .'”

“You're not going to do that,” said my husband gently. “Besides, if you have a complaint, get in line behind Mrs. Syckle, who hasn't stopped screaming 'I want to see bear!' ever since she boarded this ship. There's a mutiny underfoot to get rid of the fishing guide, and Joan had the captain backed against a fire extinguisher this morning. All I heard was 'No, you don't understand. I spent all of my alimony on this trip!' These are not happy campers.”

One day when I was in my bunk reading, I heard bells . . . five of them. My reaction surprised even me. I felt relief and said to myself, “Thank God, we're sinking.” Grabbing my life jacket, I opened the door to see the first officer tearing by. At that moment, the safety doors just outside our room banged shut with an echo of finality, preventing him from passage. He turned directions to race for another exit.