Life is a Trip

by Fein, Judith

  In addition, Christine invited her friend Maria, a singer with Lebanese roots; Maori marrieds Russell and Becky (who were going to help Antony on the trip and also share the driving); Kip, a Maori guitar player and singer; Marta and Brandon (she, an adept of diverse spiritual practices and he, a Canadian man with First Nations ancestry who played his drum a lot); my husband Paul, and me.

  “I carefully chose the pilgrims who would come with us,” Christine explained. “This isn’t a trip, you understand. It’s a pilgrimage.”

  Paul and I had never met Christine or anyone else before the pilgrimage. Christine had read my published writings, began a correspondence with me, and sent us tickets to fly to Frankfurt and meet the questers in her vision.

  Paul and I had never traveled in a camper van, but we should have known that clumps of people could not sleep comfortably—if they could sleep at all—in those tight, flimsy, traveling boxes.

  We met Christine and the clan at the airport in Frankfurt. John, tanned, manly, vigorous, and gentlemanly at almost eighty years old, greeted us with a haka—a Maori war whoop. He ritually slapped his chest and thighs and rolled out his considerable tongue. Originally designed to intimidate the enemies of the warlike Maori, the haka delighted Paul and me. And a small crowd of people, who probably thought that the water in the airport was spiked and they were hallucinating, gathered to watch the shouting, breast-beating, panting, and eye-rolling.

  Then, as his beaming, blonde wife stood proudly next to him, John presented Paul and me with beautiful pendants made of large, polished pounamu (jade). In Maori culture, as I understand it, a piece of pounamu is considered to be a taonga (treasure), which has mana and also bestows mana on its owner. Defining or translating mana is a tricky business. It was explained to me as a combination of personal prestige and character.

  If you are so inclined, you can purchase a piece of pounamu from a shop in New Zealand, but its mana comes to you when you receive it as a gift. The pounamu is found in a river on the south island of New Zealand, and only the Maori are licensed to gather it.

  Being presented with two pieces of pounamu by an elder of the Ngati Awa was no small honor for us. For many years afterwards, our pounamu pendants bobbed along on our chests wherever we went—including into the shower. Christine said that the pounamu would change color after contact with the flesh, which it did. It became burnished by the heat and oils of our bodies.

  But back to the roots trip. We flew from Germany to Italy to meet up with our vans and, when it was time to sleep, the van drivers pulled into the parking lot of a fast food restaurant. There, under the glaring lights, Christine’s crew bedded down for the night. Used to sleeping in close quarters on the floors of wharenui (meeting houses on marae, sacred Maori ceremonial and gathering spaces), a chunk of our traveling companions fell asleep. The others, by turn, and according to their ages, drummed, threw up, cried, cackled, shat, and yakked.

  Paul and I wandered from one van to the next, desperately trying to find a quiet corner where we could stretch out. There was no such place. Limbs flew in our faces, body parts were illuminated by parking lot flood lights, and we spent a sleepless night, after an equally sleepless night flight from the United States to Germany.

  I was panicked from lack of privacy, and after thirteen years of marriage, Paul and I didn’t need long discourses: “No way,” he said. “I’m outta here,” I concurred.

  When Christine has a vision, she doesn’t permit it to become polluted by the inability of two foreign wimps to handle group sleep. “From now on,” she announced, “our two American guests will sleep in hotels.”

  She was true to her word. Thereafter, our travel days ended in hotel rooms where, blessing the generosity of Christine and acknowledging our guilt about our travel mates who did not have the luxury of accommodations, we genuflected before the Deus ex Mattress and collapsed.

  The potential conflict with us was averted, but a soup of roiling emotions was simmering in the camper vans. Two words tell the tale: blended families. I always thought that “blending” entailed the combining of elements to make a smooth new entity. It turns out that, in some cases, blending means that the parts vigorously separate (by means of seething) to form a new, disunified whole.

  And this was the case in those three camper vans, for which Christine had paid an exorbitant amount of money to give wheels to her vision.

  The unexpressed hostilities that ricocheted through our dis-united family of pilgrims were immediately recognizable to me from my own family, which, although not blended, harbored enough anger to encompass four or five families at least.

  The chaos of Christine’s children seemed to unnerve the more reserved offspring of John’s former union. Lists of past hurts and oversights were branded on the hearts of some of the various children, and the daily proximity of the wounded who were thrown together by John and Christine loving each other became untenable. Natasha’s son fell and gashed his head open; Antony had a flip-out and socked Christine; Maria’s feelings were hurt and she had a little crying jag; Russell refused to drive another inch until he had more “evidence” than a general direction in which to drive; Marta was communing with Spirit; Brandon was drumming, Christine was darting left and right as she tried to keep the troops in line.

  Those of you who at one time or another belonged to a family unit can certainly envision a domestic volcano about to blow. Now imagine that volcano about to erupt in three flimsy, moving boxes.

  John Wilson seemed to be oblivious to the tensions in the campers. He sat with his hands folded, occasionally nodding off, his woolen cap balanced perfectly on his head. He’d served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, was a lawyer negotiating with the Crown for Ngati Awa claims, had been divorced, dealt with children, and had a penchant for fast cars and fast driving. Having seen and done it all, nothing rattled this elder.

  It was on the autostrada in Italy, I think, that John suddenly turned to his wife and proclaimed, “Chrissy, we have to stop the vans.”

  There was no place to stop on the freeway except the precarious slice of green island that separates traffic racing in one direction from cars careening in the other. The vans swerved and turned and bumped up on the tiny island as John calmly alit from the lead van.

  I braced for what I knew was coming: a family screaming match where each person aired every offense visited upon him since his exodus from the womb. I wondered if I could slip out of my body and watch it all from a passing cloud or dive down under the freeway asphalt and wait it out. Even though I have had spasms of anger myself when someone poked at one of my buttons, I dread angry outbursts. Some think they are cathartic, but I consider them to be approximately as appealing as botulism.

  John Wilson motioned for everyone to sit on the grass in a circle.

  Obeying the elder, the fuming, hurt, baffled, tired, teary pilgrims sat en masse—and, truth be told, since the island was longer than it was wide, it was an oblong circle.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four . . . and before I hit three in my crisis countdown, the elder spoke. He wasn’t yelling, despite the din of the BMWs and Fiats roaring by. He wasn’t—as he sometimes did—pounding his cane and waxing eloquent in Maori oratorical style. Incredibly, John Wilson was singing.

  There was a beat of silence and then Christine joined in, followed by the lilting voices of Maria and Kip. Carin began to sing and his sister Virginia chimed in, and then Jenney did as well. Antony began to bellow gleefully, and Natasha and the boys burst into song with Russell and Becky holding up their corner of the chorus. Not only didn’t I know the words to the Maori song or the melody, but even if I had, I would have been too stunned to sing as the clan in the campers began to literally harmonize.

  One song followed the next and pretty soon the family panic had turned into a picnic. Faces that were tense moments before relaxed, arms were slung around shoulders, and I was sitting in the middle of a (freeway) isle of bonhommerie.

  Elder John Wilson
was a native trickster, a wily psychologist who had sung swords into smiles. By the time the singing waned and the talking began, tempers were defused, hurts were temporarily forgotten, and we all boarded the vans until the next physical or emotional breakdown.

  John Wilson died a year ago, just shy of his ninetieth birthday. Christine claims that they are—if possible—even closer in death than they were in life.

  “He is in me, with me all the time,” she says. “We are one.”

  I will never forget John performing a haka—with his jawbone protruding, his big eyes bulging out, and his breath rolling out over his long tongue. But, most of all, I will remember the way he avoided conflict by singing. I, who am among the most direct of people, understood from the Maori elder that sometimes a circuitous route can be more effective: song or play or joking or storytelling can soften a tough situation and make it manageable.

  Shortly after I came home from the roots trip, I was, metaphorically speaking, back in the camper vans again. A couple I know was on the verge of either breakup or murder; it was hard to tell which. They sat in my living room, glowering at each other, and then unleashed a torrent of accusations replete with finger-pointing, rising voices, and faces twisted into grimaces of anger and resentment. After they had exploded at each other, they turned to me, each trying to solicit an outsider’s support for his or her point of view.

  I sat quietly for a moment, and then, instead of addressing the marital discord, I thought of John Wilson and suggested we all go for a walk. They hesitated for a moment . . . and then agreed.

  We put on our jackets and went outdoors. I led them to a park that is cattycorner to our house, and, as we walked around the periphery, we saw a couple with two dogs and two toddlers. The couple spoke to the dogs and toddlers with the same words and same intonations, and the canines and kids lined up behind them in a neat row. I burst out laughing. My friends burst out laughing. They exchanged a quick glance. The man remarked that one of the dogs reminded him of their pooch. The woman agreed. They began to talk about their beloved four-legged. And, as they did so, the hostility melted. Just like that.

  As far as I could tell, the only thing Ed English was missing was half a finger. He had lost it when he was sawing. His wife retrieved the severed digit and off they went to the hospital with Ed at the wheel. The doctors convinced him that he’d be better off without the mass of nerves, muscles, and tendons that made up his finger, so he shrugged and agreed with them.

  I’m not sure what the docs did with the piece of finger, but Ed said kids love to see him place his knuckle stump under his nostril; it gives the illusion that the rest of his finger is crawling up inside his nose. Sooner or later, the kids figure out that there is no crawling, no finger, and Ed is an adult dude with a wicked sense of kid humor.

  Ed lives in the Gros Morne National Park area of Newfoundland and he’s the local Donald Trump with much better hair. He was once in a bookstore when his wife called on his cell phone to say she’d found a cool house. “Buy it,” he urged her, and she did. He also bought a lighthouse and half an island, sight unseen.

  Quirpon Island, which I like to call “Ed’s island,” is off the northern tip of Newfoundland. In late June to early July, it’s blessed with icebergs, whales, and Ed’s kayaks, which you can reserve at Ed’s lighthouse or, more correctly, Ed’s lighthouse keeper’s house, which he has turned into an inn.

  To get there, you catch a boat at St. Antony’s. Depending upon the weather and the size of the boat that shows up, you head for a dock near the lighthouse or a dock several foot hours away. The day I went, the small wooden boat stopped at the far side of Quirpon, which, by the way, rhymes with “harpoon.”

  I felt a couple of levels of dismay as Ed helped me out of the boat. First, I had ignorantly packed for summer and it was the kind of weather you expect when you are drinking eggnog and decorating a tree. I was wearing wafer-thin pants, a quick-drying shirt, and Crocs. The ugly, Swiss-cheese-holed Crocs I had sworn never to wear, ended up being the shoes I never took off, and I had worn them so insistently that they had no tread left. Second, Ed informed me, it could take anywhere from thirty-five minutes to four hours to hike to the lighthouse.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I whined, and Ed sort of made a clicking noise with his tongue and mumbled, “We’ll work it out.”

  “It’s muddy,” I protested. “I’m carrying a five-pound handbag, a book, and . . .”

  “No problem,” Ed said. He grabbed my bag, book, and he would have grabbed me and put me in his backpack if I had been capable of folding up that compactly.

  The Crocs and the cold weren’t my only problems. Give me flat terrain and I can walk until the Messiah comes. But add a steep incline, and some exercise-activated asthma gnomes slow me to a crawl. There were hills on Quirpon. It was a “bear climbed over the mountain” sort of island; you climbed up one hill and there was another. And on and on. If you were Ed, a mountain goat, you could get off the boat at 5:30, run over the hills, and arrive at the lighthouse in thirty-five minutes, just in time for supper. If you were I, you probably wouldn’t arrive until dessert or brandy.

  Did I forget to mention black biting things? I’d killed off dozens before I’d made it up the first hill and they lay ugly and dead, where they met their untimely end—on my neck, scalp, and forehead. I had forgotten to pack bug spray. I didn’t think no-see-ums or mosquitoes, or whatever they were, flew that far north.

  I was cold, bitten, panting, and trying not to slide in my treadless Crocs. Ed was whistling and cheerfully telling local tales of murders and suicides, people stranded and having their limbs lopped off to avoid gangrene. I tried to douse my imagination, which was on fire.

  If my grandmother had been the type who baked sponge cake, this is how it would have felt underfoot if I had walked on it. The terrain on Quirpon Island wasn’t exactly bog. More like springy lichen. It was quite unlike any other surface I’d ever experienced, except briefly in the Canadian Arctic, when I was so cold I wore seven layers of clothes and I couldn’t appreciate the subtlety beneath my four pairs of socks and hiking boots. My Crocs sank in, my Crocs came out. Up. Down. Up. Down. If it had been flat, I would have bounced my way to the lighthouse. But since it was impossible to bounce uphill, I proceeded like a Slinky for the first hour.

  “How much longer?” I asked Ed, feeling like a six-year-old in the back of a car that daddy was driving.

  “Well, it could be some more hours,” Ed replied. Ignoring my barely suppressed panic, he bent over, plucked some golden berries and proffered them to me. “These are bake apples,” he said. “Also called cloudberries.”

  “I don’t suppose they’re covered in moose shit or anything?” I asked.

  “Nope. No moose on Quirpon Island.”

  “Elk?”

  “Not a chance. You might encounter some birds or mink, but cross my heart, no mink shit either.”

  I ate one bake apple, then two. They were soft and sweet, melting evenly on the palate.

  Next came blueberries, then partridgeberries. And, as I savored them, Ed pointed out large purple fireweeds, purple-stemmed aster, bluebells, black crowberries, and bunchberries (also called crackerberries), which made up the Quirpon ground cover.

  Every time Ed introduced me to a different weed or flower, I had an excuse to pause and shore up my breath for the next hill. Two and a half hours after disembarking from the boat, we arrived at the lighthouse. I was secretly proud of myself for braving the cold, crumbling Crocs, mud, wind, and hills. As the three graces who run the lighthouse keeper’s house served a traditional Jigg’s Dinner (made of beef, potato, turnip, peas porridge, and cabbage), I settled in and decided I was going to like Ed’s island.

  Until the next day. A cold wind that blew no one any good came howling in, the sky was Porta-Potty gray, and it began to rain. I selected a book from Ed’s library and dug in. Ed, who is a voracious reader, suggested I might want to have a look at the picture-book-pretty-white-trimmed-wi
th-red lighthouse and the area around it.

  The next thing I knew, I had borrowed a jacket and moose hide gloves and was hiking. I scampered over some rocks and kept climbing higher and higher until I could see out over the ocean where whales swam and icebergs often spend a few weeks or a month. It began to rain. My aging Crocs were slipping and sliding. Suddenly Ed appeared, leaping over the rocks, wearing nothing more than shorts and a T-shirt. Without saying anything, he held out an arm. I grabbed it so hard I almost separated it from its socket. And, just like that, oblivious to the rain, wind, cold, and mud, Ed helped me over the rain-lashed rocks, whistling merrily as I inched along.

  I kept thinking that Ed must have moods. No one can be that relentlessly cheery and helpful. If you want a book, some information, a special drink, or food, Ed provides it. Effortlessly. I leaned forward to see if there were gnash marks on his teeth or if his brow was furrowed. Nothing.

  “Want to climb up the lighthouse?” Ed asked.

  Hmm. I did want to go to the top, but it was that damn climbing thing again. And cold. And dark. I wondered if I could do it.

  “Just don’t fall in the hole,” Ed laughed as he unlocked the lighthouse door and ushered me inside. Then he disappeared.

  When I got to the top, I gazed through the window of the lighthouse and saw Ed. He was running over his island, maybe going to fetch something or perhaps for exercise or the sheer joy of the run.

  The last day I was in Newfoundland, I mentioned to Ed that I was interested in learning more about Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a swashbuckling doctor/preacher/artist/writer/humanitarian who, in 1892, had brought medical care and social services to the folks who had neither in Labrador and Newfoundland. He empowered women to start a cottage industry with their skills of hooking rugs and producing crafts. He yanked fishermen from the clutches of merchants who kept them dependent and impoverished, and he taught the fishermen to form their own cooperatives. He braved ice and storms, traveled by dogsled, slept in snow, and risked his life to help impecunious fishermen and natives. Once, stranded on ice with his dogsled, he had to kill his beloved dogs and use their fur to survive the frigid weather. With their bones, he built a flagpole to signal his distress. Later, he erected a monument to them.