A good omen, eh? I trust my birds.
The waka were driven by skilled boatmen. As soon as we got into open water, a pair of Tursiops truncatus surfaced, and accompanied us for many kilometres. Now, I love bottlenose dolphins, know their colouration at home in Aotearoa very well. These ones were a kind of greenish colour I wasn’t familiar with – anyway, they took us to the entry to the bay before Taputapuatea....
. . . . . . . . . . .
What did I expect, especially with all the good omens?
A place where, for once, I would feel unadulterated holiness?
Yeah.
Something like that.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I’ve been partially trained in a Japanese fighting art (aikido): this training means you have some ingrained, almost automatic responses. When I arrived on the grotty rubbish-bestricken beach at Taputapuatea – there were stray jandals and plastic water bottles and worse floating in the water – I found myself adopting a fighting stance. And I kept it, as the strong karanga group of women led us on to the marae.
Taputapuatea is not physically impressive. It is a black coral wall, and side walls, not all that high, with some old trees (but the tohunga knew their names – those trees, those walls… they’d been around for a while). He chanted, and then stooped, and crawled towards the wall (everybody averted their eyes – but I can’t, I am an observer, a note-taker) and poked the tribal treasure into a crevice in the wall.
And then backed away, still crawling, until he reached an unseen boundary whereupon he stood up. The aunties burst into song and the atmosphere immediately became much lighter.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The only time I asked a question of the tohunga was as we were leaving. It was, ‘Given the tohu before I came to Taputapuatea, why did I adopt a fighting stance?’
He explained that it was in my blood: ‘One of your tipuna was killed there.’
Well – who knows?
. . . . . . . . . . .
We went back to Tahiti. Gauguin paintings in a church didn’t make the place any more welcoming.
The day before we left, I had a dish of raw fish that tasted mainly of garlic (and left me with diarrhoea and complications for the next two months).
And, halfway through the flight home (the tohunga huddled with his guard of aunties), the captain of the plane announced, ‘We have just learned that the Rainbow Warrior has been blown up and one person is dead.’
Death Trip
BY PETER HO DAVIES
Peter Ho Davies is the author of a novel, The Welsh Girl, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and two story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. One of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan.
The first time my wife and I moved across the US – from Atlanta to Eugene, Oregon – was in the late summer of 1997. I was changing jobs, swapping one university for another, and although my new position came with relocation expenses, we opted against putting our car on a truck and flying out, and instead decided to take a week and drive west.
We were young(ish) and indulging in the romance of the great American road trip, as popularized in books and movies and, in a sense, reaching back to before there even were roads to take such trips on. We crossed the Mississippi in the shadow of the St Louis Arch, monument to the city’s role as gateway to the West, stopped outside Salt Lake City at Promontory Summit where the tracks of the first transcontinental railroad were joined, and paused near journey’s end at an Oregon Trail museum, where the original wagon ruts of the pioneers could still be seen worn deep into the rocky ground. This wasn’t my history – I’m an expat Brit – but I was at least as thrilled as my American wife to see these famous sights (and several lesser ones). To see them and, of course, be seen with them in the obligatory photos, since secure in the knowledge that our trip was purposeful, necessary, we could while away the miles – guiltlessly – as gawking tourists.
We got to Oregon, to a friend’s house in Portland, on my 31st birthday, and after celebrating late into the evening, woke the next morning to the news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris.
It felt like news from another planet. Not just for its abruptness – we’d barely looked at a newspaper in days – but because after a week of travel, all of it westward, England and France felt impossibly remote. And then, in the days that followed, came the unreality of the mourning, watching the funeral in the small hours of the morning on a borrowed TV in our otherwise empty house in Eugene (our furniture wouldn’t arrive on the delayed moving truck for two more weeks, adding to the dislocating sense of limbo). Britain seemed distant geographically, but also suddenly culturally and emotionally, to judge from the unprecedented scenes of mass public grief. Diana’s death dismayed me, as that of any young person would, but never having paid much attention to the Royal Family, I didn’t feel the loss with the personal intensity of those crowds on TV. To make matters stranger, as the new Brit in town, I was constantly being asked about her death, and even having people offer me their condolences. Britain seemed at once farther away and yet more American than I’d ever imagined.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The second time my wife and I moved across the US – this time heading east – was two years later, for another job. We’d enjoyed the cross-country drive so much we decided to do it again in reverse, this time via a more northern route that took in Yellowstone Park and Old Faithful, Little Big Horn, Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls. Along the way, we pitched up late one night in Cody, Wyoming, to find it was the weekend of the Buffalo Bill Stampede Rodeo, and the only room to be had was in a particularly seedy motel. The shag carpeting in the room was so long and unkempt it looked like it could hide cigarette butts and hypodermic needles. On the inside of the door my wife counted the screw-hole stigmata of three previous locks. We slept with a chair propped against the current one, and woke the next morning to the cable news that John F. Kennedy Jr’s plane was missing, presumed lost, in Nantucket Sound en route to Martha’s Vineyard.
Later that day, back in the car, tracking the search on the radio, but already knowing the worst, my wife joked bleakly that we’d better not take any more cross-country drives, but I could tell she was affected. She felt she knew ‘John-John,’ his family, the way others felt they had known Princess Diana. We can’t know such distant figures personally, of course, she seemed to be saying, but we can know what they mean to us. Our mourning is for them, but also for some part of ourselves.
. . . . . . . . . . .
You have a lot of time to think on a three-thousand-mile drive: of where you’re leaving, where you’re going, but mostly, in my case, of how long it’s taking. As I had moved to the US only a few years earlier, the sheer scale of the country was still being revealed to me on those trips. I understood it intellectually, from maps, but I’d never felt it before – felt it in my aching back after sitting in a car for ten hours a day, felt it in my desperation to stop and get out of the car and see … well, almost anything (including the world’s largest ketchup bottle on one occasion).
The very words country or nation, in a Western European context at least, seem to mean something different, something smaller, more cohesive and graspable. Consider that casually naive question from friends and family at home after I first arrived in the US, ‘What’s America like?’ – a question I could answer tentatively about New England where I first lived, but which I couldn’t begin to address in regard to the West, or the Midwest, the Gulf Coast, or the Mountain States. The British, myself included, are occasionally amused (and/or exasperated) by the American error that on such a small island we must all know each other, but the analogous error is our assuming one can know America based on the experience of one region. Even the British habit of referring to America, rather than the United States, makes a subtle assumption of wholeness. To put it another way, I knew about as much of San Francisco from my time in Bosto
n as your average Londoner might know of Moscow.
Projected on to the scale of a continent, familiar concepts like country and nation began to seem less certain, less descriptive than aspirational. Somewhere on those long drives, it came to me that a vast and relatively young nation like the US – for all its vaunted self-confidence – is still trying desperately to reassure itself of its very nationhood. This is a country, after all, that still vividly recalls its own divisive civil war, not to mention the divisive struggles a hundred years later for civil rights. The prevalence of US flags, fluttering from post offices and town halls, from schools and houses, so easily mistaken for rampant jingoism by a European, serve, in fact, as a reminder, a fluttering hope, of something shared by people spread out over thousands of square miles. Even the stultifying sameness of those widely bemoaned aspects of American culture – chain stores, strip malls, ubiquitous fast-food restaurants – speaks to an effort to tame the nation’s scale, to offer the comfort of familiarity across the vastness (a descendant of the pioneering tendency to name the new after the old: New York, New England, New Orleans), to unite, in a word.
But, of course, the deaths of Diana and John Kennedy during those trips also put me in mind of that other great American obsession (now exported globally) – fame – and made me think of it, too, as a response to scale. An obsession with mass media, with popular culture, with all the celebrity faces glowing on screens and glossy pages, seemed like yet another attempt to clutch at something shared.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Even before those deaths and their blanket media coverage, though, my wife and I were being reminded of another brand of fame on those road trips, for surely famous sights and landmarks count as celebrities of sorts, too, immortalized as they are in photographs, on television, in books and movies. Landmarks, indeed, might qualify as our oldest celebrities – think of the pyramids, or the Coliseum, the Parthenon or the Great Wall – global images, like those of more recent ‘stars’ such as the Eiffel Tower, or Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, that we grow up with and encounter countless times in our lives.
But if the famous – whether people or sights – give us something to share, there are obvious differences between them, too. It’s easier to visit the latter, for one thing, though when we do, we experience in part the same odd shock of recognition that we feel when we spot a famous person on the street. We sense at once that we know them intimately, have always known them, even if we’ve never met them before, never set foot in this place before.
I used to think that we visited such places to assure ourselves – to confirm that such sights, previously only glimpsed in two dimensions, really exist – but I suspect that what also thrills us in such encounters is a momentary, vertiginous sense of our own unreality. These places are iconic, and by approaching them we become briefly iconic too, just as we might glancingly enter the aura of a famous person we’re photographed with. Consider how swiftly we rush to put ourselves in the picture, literally, how intent we are on rendering the three-dimensional reality before us two-dimensional again via photography – the key difference being that once that image is printed or displayed, we’ll now be in the scene ourselves. I’m reminded here of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which I saw years earlier as a teenager on a brief stop-over in that city, and the iconic/ ironic photo opportunity we all succumb to there, posing, hands out, as if propping up the toppling tower, an illusion – of interaction, of proximity – only possible in two dimensions.
The other distinction between famous people and famous places, of course, is that the former will inevitably die. When they do we mourn them, but perhaps we also mourn the very fact that they can die. The ultimate allure of fame, after all, is the illusion of immortality. It’s the nearest many of us can get to imagining an afterlife.
. . . . . . . . . . .
One last US trip, alone this time, and not by car. I was in Washington, DC, on the morning of 9/11, serving as a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts’ fellowships, one of a group of writers gathered in an upper-floor conference room in the Old Post Office building at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue (about halfway between the White House and the Capitol building). From its windows we could glimpse the smoke from the Pentagon as a smudge on the horizon before we were evacuated back to our hotel seven blocks north. There, on TV, I watched the towers of the World Trade Center come down. And while the loss of life was appalling, it was the image of those landmarks collapsing that staggered me most. I didn’t know those poor people (though reading their obituaries in the weeks to come was heartbreaking), but I knew those buildings, had been in them myself.
Reality itself seemed to shudder in those moments. And the terrorists surely knew that it would. They were tourists, too, after all. They passed their free time at Sea World and the San Diego Zoo; they met up in Las Vegas, large-scale models of all the famous world sights craning over their shoulders as they plotted; they bought their tickets on expedia.com. Mohammed Atta signed up for American Airlines’ frequent flyer program on August 25th, 2001. And the sights we see today – the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sears Tower, the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and farther afield, St Peter’s, the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House – are all altered since, each overlaid with a ghostly pair of cross-hairs.
Those terrorists killed three thousand people, destroyed buildings, put a stop to air travel for several days, and altered it for all of us for years to come. I and my fellow writers, for want of anything else to do, went back to our deliberations, and then when we were allowed and able left town as best we could. One colleague bought a car – none could be rented – to drive home cross-country (to the Pacific Northwest as it happened). I caught the train north to Boston, where I (and the terrorists) had earlier flown from, passing through New York on the way, seeing the smoke and the absence over lower Manhattan – that iconic, altered skyline – from a slowly moving train car.
But on the night of 9/11, I’d walked out of my hotel into the quiet streets of the capital. I’d been able to get through to my wife by phone and she’d begged me to keep safe, stay indoors, and I’d promised I would. But I lied. I wanted to see the White House, felt drawn to it, and so I walked the half-dozen or so blocks towards the flood-lit glow of it. There were police cruisers blocking Pennsylvania Avenue in front, but it was there, and so were we – myself, and others like me who’d come to see it. We were staring at it, drinking it in, imprinting it, as if we’d never seen it before – which in a way we hadn’t, not like this, small and brittle looking, pale as bone against the night sky. And no one was taking photos. In retrospect it feels as if it would have been inappropriate somehow, disrespectful even, but perhaps it was simply because we didn’t need to. The building had never been more real.
Postscript
No one may have been taking photos outside the White House that night, but a couple of weeks later a briefly famous photo appeared on the internet. It shows a man, nondescript but clearly a tourist by the tense casualness of his pose, on the observation deck of one of the Twin Towers. It’s a bright sunny day, the sky is blue, and below him, looming hugely over his shoulder as he smiles at the camera (you want to shout, as if at a pantomime, Behind you!) is a plane. A stunning image, the photo was supposedly found in a camera in the ruins at Ground Zero.
Only it wasn’t. It’s a fake, created by a Hungarian man called Peter, sometimes known as the ‘tourist of death’ (his face and figure have subsequently been photoshopped into dozens of other disaster scenes – floods, earthquakes – giving him a macabre ubiquity somewhere between Waldo and the Grim Reaper).
If this seems appalling, it is. But if it also seems on reflection queasily beguiling, it’s that too, I think. This image of the frozen before renders the disaster at once more and less real. We stare the horror in the face, even as – once we know the photo is faked – we feel a kind of giddy relief that this one ‘victim’ has been spared. What really fascinates though is the motive to make such an image, to
put oneself in the picture. It feels both empathic – a reaching out – and a denial, not of the dead, but of death itself. The photo might be a cheat – one reason we decry it – but perhaps it’s not meant to cheat us.
After all, much as it shocks us when Diana, or a Kennedy, Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean or Buddy Holly (two more travel fatalities) dies, what stirs us too is the way their fame lives on, undiminished (even enhanced). Their very ends become famous, their deaths immortal. And then we visit their remains – their homes, their statues, their graves – and all the other monuments to the dead (Mount Rushmore and Little Big Horn among them, but really what monument isn’t a mausoleum to someone who built it, or lived in it, or even visited it). And we take our pictures with them.
In some sense we are, all of us, in the end, tourists of death.
A Visit to San Quentin
BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Author of the national bestsellers A Widow’s Story, We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde and The Falls, she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Her most recent books are the novel Mudwoman and the story collection The Corn Maiden. In the spring of 2011, she co-taught a course in creative writing at San Quentin.
We came to San Quentin on a chill sunny morning in April 2011.
The visitor to San Quentin is surprised that, from a little distance, the prison buildings are very distinctive. The main building is likely to be warmly glowing in sunshine and more resembles a historic architectural landmark, or a resort hotel, than one of the most notorious prisons in North America. Beyond the prison compound, to the south, are hills as denuded of trees as the rolling, dreamlike hills in a Grant Wood painting; to the north are blue-sparkling San Francisco Bay and beyond it the glittering high-rise buildings of the fabled city of San Francisco several miles away.
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