The truth is, for every four hours in the air, crossing the troposphere at five hundred mph, you spend five hours plodding through labyrinthine airports.
Most of our fellow passengers were old, spending their sensibly invested savings on travel, broadening their minds by having a look at airports around the world. It struck me how cruel it was, actually, a practical joke; the conspiracy of some coterie of international airport architects (which must be a pretty small club when you think about it, and so quite capable of well-planned sadism) to force these senior citizens to haul their hand-luggage and duty-free for miles around air-conditioned hangars, to tramp the binless-clean, glass-sided corridors, succumbing to stroll fatigue, sitting down on dispersed benches, dropping like flies. Stragglers are picked off by wheelchair-toting, tip-hungry valets, by surly hunch-shouldered golf-cart drivers beeping and flashing the spent, decrepit losers in this game back, doubtless, to a Gate from which a plane will drag them prematurely home.
That’s what I thought. And then I realised: I’d fooled myself by focusing on one or two arthritic old stoics limping to a standstill. For they were the minority, the exceptions. Most of the white-haired, wrinkled and eager-eyed travellers were slim and sprightly. They were twice as fit as me.
“Come along, Mum,” I chivvied as she crawled along. “We’ll miss our next connection.”
“Don’t take any notice of him,” Lily countered, offering Mum her arm. I’m always thrown by how well they get on, those two. Lily has a mystifying amount of patience for my mother, while Mum feels she’s being treated like a proper lady every time Lily opens her mouth. Plus they’re always colluding against me.
“He was just like that as a little boy, Lily,” Mum gasped. “A sly tyrant he was. We won’t let him get away with it, will we?”
“Let’s ignore him, Ma,” said Lily.
“We’ll be forced to leave you behind, Mum,” I warned. “They’ll have to shunt you on after us.”
§
The fact is, my wife and I do live modestly, but I was lying just now: Lily bought Economy tickets, yes, but I had them quietly upgraded to Business, and there we were, breathing in those recycled germs, those colds and flu, pumping around the cabin, as we flew over the Atlantic with my old ma, the two teenagers and my wife’s manic-depressive Uncle Sebastian, who’s not just miserable but paranoid with it. He’s one of those people who, when he does deign to say something, thinks it’ll be so interesting that everyone else will want to listen in. So he talks sotto voce and he looks over his shoulder to make sure no one’s eavesdropping. He was in a window seat, I’m serious, he did it on the plane. “I advise you to take the vegetarian in-flight,” he confided, and then he glanced back over his shoulder, out of the window, honestly, at thirty thousand feet. Then he leaned back to me. “The meat they use is illegal,” Sebastian whispered. “Animal feed.”
§
We stayed in Santa Fe, where I met the chap, who explained more about his research into complex systems in phynance: the ways in which he was using computers to model the global flows of currency exchange and commodity futures, searching for pattern and probability. The Institute was established not only to encourage the investigation of complexity but to do so through the open exchange of ideas across disciplines. I found it fascinating, though what it has to do with supplying potatoes is probably not a lot. Selling spuds is simplicity itself! Even if the annual world market is worth a hundred billion dollars, and we ourselves sell almost a quarter of a million tons a year. This chap was sharp, though. Within minutes of me talking, he said, “I can see where your energy must be directed. At improving potatoes’ use in convenience foods. Am I right?”
“Pretty much,” I said. I didn’t say anything about Alpha-Gen; it was still early days.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “Take-out food. Kids are all to go now. In our house, tell them it’s time for dinner, they put their coats on.”
“Also,” I said, “we have to combat competition from alternative carbohydrates.”
“Rice, and pasta. Maize-based products. Imports in general.”
“Imported potato products. Yes, you’re right. It’s a problem. Kept in check only by a superior increase in our exports.”
§
It was late summer, and it was hot. We had to drink prodigious amounts of water to replenish that lost through heat and dehydration, which was easy enough to do while we were sweating, but even at night when it was cold you still had to remember to keep glugging back liquid, because of the altitude, six, seven thousand feet.
We were up in high desert country. I imagined the plane that brought us had less touched down in Albuquerque than climbed on to this great plateau. I was reminded that potatoes come from the Andean altiplano, twelve thousand feet above sea level. Wild, knobbly tubers cultivated in Peru, able to grow up there on the snowline, which the Spanish brought to Europe four hundred years ago. Twice as high as northern New Mexico, and here was quite high enough for us to get altitude sickness, me included: dizziness, headaches and a queasy stomach, but without the release of vomiting or diarrhoea.
Every time Glint knocked back another plastic bottle of water, he said, “It’s like clubbing.” Lily had to ask him to please stop dropping the empties at his feet. There was some question as to whether you might be able to drink water from the tap: the answer depended upon whom you asked. Indigenous folk told us, “Sure. Drunk it all my life.” Most of the people we met, however, were Californians and Texans—Hippies, Artists, Trust Funders—who were making their contribution to urban sprawl into the lovely desert around Santa Fe, and who shook their heads emphatically. “Oh, no. Drink bottled water. Lots of it. The water table here’s full of crap.”
§
The white-water season hadn’t quite finished, so my nephews and I rafted down a stately stretch of the Rio Grande with a guide who said he swept chimneys in the winter. The rafting seemed to exhaust the boys, and they spent the rest of the holiday in slumped postures, in cars or hotel rooms or art galleries, on the verge of sleep. English youth worn out by growing and wanking and the heat.
Glint was clearly locked in that phase when a chap’s constantly threatened by a hard-on. That’ll spring up on you in public places. The rhythm of a bus, sunlight through a window, never mind an actual girl, the faintest glimpse or scent of whom can bring disaster to a social gathering. Years spent trying to conceal this bulge in your trousers, this massive extrusion you’re convinced everyone else can see. Poor kids.
Lily took Mum shopping, which, translated, meant forcing expensive ethnic clothes on to her reluctant body. And urging her to enter the vitamin and mineral culture before it was too late, to make a serious investment in C and E and beta carotene to turn back the premature ageing of, if not my mother’s body, then at least her addled brain and nervous system. Then, leaving Mum to recover, Lily tried to work through for herself the complex ethics of haggling with naive Hispanic painters, and with obese Native Americans in the Plaza over their turquoise jewellery.
What Lily’s uncle did most of the time I’ve no idea. He seemed to be mostly somewhere else. “Cruising,” I told my wife, but she couldn’t think of anything else. He really might have found a gay bar in Santa Fe and ensconced himself unsmiling there.
We broke up slogs in and out of the art galleries around Canyon Road with meals in El Farol, or went over to Vanessie and Zia Diner. It was hard to munch through a meal uninterrupted by adjoining tables: our disparate group seemed to constitute a kind of shooting gallery. Inveterate conversationalists felt free to take a potshot at one or other of us. Plus Lily being just visibly pregnant got a few monologues started. One guy, in his sixties, sat straight-spined behind a pot belly in stretch-denim, told us he had four kids and twelve grandkids, and described their various achievements that—he left us in no doubt—reflected every one upon the legacy of his example and genes, before stating most proudly of all, “I ain’t never changed a diaper in my life.”
We looked to hi
s wife to see what she thought of this, but she turned out to be his second or third spouse, childless herself, and apparently as proud of him and his pot belly as he was.
§
I did a bit of walking oh my own, but we attempted one climb all of us together. A stroll up Atalaya Mountain, above Santa Fe, but below the ski area. It didn’t look that high and the sign where we parked the car said 2.5 miles to the top. But I confess I should have checked; I was in charge. My ageing mother, my pregnant wife, her old uncle, and two spindly, exhausted lads. We had one small water bottle each and we began to sweat as soon as we started to climb through the pines.
Uncle Sebastian put his head down, stared grimly at the sand and rock path before him and—you have to give it to the old bugger—plodded unfailingly uphill, ignoring sporadic walkers who howdy-ed past us on their way down.
Clint and Lee groaned and argued and gasped, kept stopping out of boredom, so that they then had to jog uphill to catch up or even, with a burst of futile, short-lived energy, find Sebastian up ahead, exhausting themselves afresh, and we’d overtake one or other of them spreadeagled, gasping like a beached fish at the side of the trail.
Lily ambled uphill. It was my mother who was the problem. I didn’t realise anyone could walk quite that slowly, without going backwards. It looked like she was putting more effort into not making progress than into doing so. It was literally impossible to walk beside her; you could not stop your limbs from opening up this gap between you and her, so that we then had to wait for her up ahead. So although I tried my best to keep us all together in a group—I, the middle-aged Managing Director of a major British potato company, was trotting up and down between people like a tongue-lolling puppy—within half an hour we were strung out along the steepening path.
§
Dry heat in the thin air has this cell-thinning quality. Up in the high desert. You suck dry air down your throat and into your lungs, you get used to it, and it lifts you. The sweat dries pleasantly on your skin. The sky’s blue and huge above the trees and you can believe a peace, a stillness, has settled not just in a small place around you but over the whole earth. You understand why Native Americans came to places like this to take peyote and pray.
§
An hour and a half passed; Lily and I rose above the luxury adobe homes, finally, and what I took to be the top of Atalaya, glimpsed through the pines, still seemed a long way off. The landscape’s on such a larger scale than one’s used to in cramped little England that I kept getting space and distance wrong. Then what happened was I was with Lily when we came to a point where the path split: a sign said Steep Trail this way, Easier Trail that way. We decided to take a break for the lunch of sandwiches and fruit I was carrying in a rucksack, but our dour trailblazer proved to be out of earshot up above us. My mother was way out of sight far below. The boys—I didn’t know where they were.
Lily and I decided to climb up the Steep Trail: if Sebastian had taken the Easier fork, we could cut him off.
After a few panting minutes we reached the spot where the Steep and Easier Trails converged, and we waited for everyone else. The first person to appear, though, was a local hiker skimming down the path.
“Have you seen an old chap climbing up ahead?” I asked. “Seventyish. Medium height. Grim-looking.”
“Yeh, he didn’t say hello. Is that the guy? He’s stumpin up the mountain, man. Head down.”
It had to be Sebastian. Lily agreed I should scamper up and catch him, while she went back down to where the Steep and Easier Trails diverged, with the rucksack, to meet my dawdling mother. That’s where we’d have lunch; that was our rendezvous point. And one or other of us would meet the boys, wherever the hell they were. She’d take the Easier trail down, because that would be the one my mother would take if by remote chance she, coming up, reached the fork below before my wife did going down.
Looking back, it was a perfectly executed fiasco. I climbed, going steadily and disbelievingly faster, till I was practically jogging up the increasingly difficult and steep rocky path, my thighs burning, lungs gasping. I caught up with no one, I saw no one, I was throat-raw for water, but I scrambled up to the top of Atalaya Mountain. There was a fierce, fit-looking American senior citizen who wasn’t Sebastian at all. When I addressed him he nodded his head in my general direction. He was wearing chic sleek outdoors gear, in bright colours at stark odds with his demeanour, and I realised that I should have described to the earlier walker Sebastian’s white cotton shirt, his threadbare canvas slacks, his scuffed brogues.
But then, with the air in my head, I guess, light-headed, I forgot my responsibilities and looked out across the Rio Grande valley there. Wide desert beyond. The swooning exhilaration of that enormous, planetary view, earned by one’s footsteps and one’s own lungs’ oxygenated blood. You feel insignificant in that vastness yet so amazed by it it makes you feel as alive as you’ve ever felt.
§
Meanwhile. The Steep Trail demanded a brisk clamber, while the Easier Trail wound slowly around a great wide nub of the mountain. Uncle Sebastian had taken the Easier Trail. That was all right, because Lily met him going down, and he turned right around and accompanied her back to the fork, our rendezvous point. My mother, meanwhile, had crept up to that point while my wife was meandering down the interminable Easier Trail, and she, predicting correctly that we would have gone up the Steep Trail, somehow summoned up the energy to attempt it. Ascending, finally, to where the Trails became one again, she sensibly sat down to drink the rest of my water and wait for someone.
No one came. I was at the summit above, Lily and her uncle were now sitting at the lunch place below, and my poor mother sat alone, on what for her was a godforsaken mountain on an alien continent. Eventually she got up and started stumbling back down, on the Easier Trail. And at some point my old mother just walked right off the map. It was a marked path, there were blue diamond signs tacked to tree trunks every ten yards or so, but she didn’t notice them, and maybe there was a deer’s track, or rabbit’s path, I don’t know, but Mum stepped off the Easier Trail and wandered into the vast expanse of trees.
I trotted down the path and reached the rendezvous point, and there were Lily and Sebastian, chewing their sandwiches anxiously. Lily and I looked at each other.
“Where can she possibly be?” I asked.
“You came down the Steep Trail, right?” Lily asked. “Then I just don’t know. I can’t figure it.”
I did a loop up the Steep Trail and down the Easier one. A few other walkers came up or down and we asked them if they’d seen her, but no one had.
“There’s a kid a ways down,” one chap told us. “Lying by the path. Don’t know what the hell he was doing there.”
“Yes, that’ll be one of ours,” I said.
“What, you’re losing your whole damn family today, feller?”
I didn’t need sarcasm from a Yank. “Yes, thank you for your help.”
“I said, “Are you OK, buddy?” And the kid kinda groaned back. Lying there in the trees.”
There was no sign of my mother. We made our way down, eventually, calmly frantic, as dusk was falling. We found Clint lying beside the path, sound asleep, and roused him. We got back to the car and there was my mother, sitting on a boulder like a little old pixie.
We crowded her. “How on earth are you? What happened up there? How did you get here?”
She smiled brightly. “I realised I’d gone off the path, but as long as I kept going downhill I’d be safe.”
She’d come to a house and knocked on the door to ask directions, she told us, and an old guy answered holding a gun. A rifle. He asked what she wanted, pointing the gun at her, and slammed the door in her startled face. My bewildered mother reeled down the road. The man’s son, embarrassed by his father’s behaviour, drove after her, gave her a bottle of water, and chauffeured her to the walkers’ parking spot. Where she waited patiently for the rest of us to join her.
We were so relieved we all f
orgot about the younger boy, and I would have driven off if Lee hadn’t appeared at the last second, having not only reached the top but explored up along the ridge, entered the proscribed water supply area, and seen three deer. “One of them with the biggest antlers ever!”
§
What’s the point? The point of what happened, I think, is this: that we’re sovereign individuals. We talk different languages, even when we think we talk the same. It’s every man for himself, except for convenience’ sake. There’s only so much time to help each other up the mountain. At some stage you have to say, “I’m sorry. I want to reach the top. I’ll see you later. I’m going up there now, on my own.”
People get lost on the mountain. The peak awaits the climber. That’s the point, I believe.
§
The other of Lily’s interests she was able to indulge in Santa Fe, other than art, was the New Age stuff. It’s all there. She saw one woman, Careen was her name. Internationally Known Intuitive and Spiritual Psychic. It said on her card she came from Three Generations of Celtic Healers. An ancient lineage. It said she did Cards. Palms. Runes. Aura Reading. I met Careen. A big cuddly woman, she told me she specialised in multidimensional growth. On her card it said, The Tiniest Angel Sings the Loudest Song. I chatted with her before she saw Lily. She was charming. Most of the fruitcakes are.
2002 - Wake up Page 15
