by Dina Bennett
After dinner, we play bingo with hundreds of others. It’s Bernard’s first time at this favorite of small-town church fundraisers. We each get one bingo card. Thankfully they’re the US sort: a five-by-five grid, the letters B, I, N, G, and O each heading a column of numbers. I’m relieved to recognize the card set-up, since the last time I played bingo I was twelve years old. “What do I do?” Bernard asks me. It’s not often in our life together that Bernard asks me to teach him something, or, to put this another way, that Bernard doesn’t know something he wants to know. I point to the transparent tumbler up front, inside of which forced air is sending seventy-five ping-pong balls into a frenzied, leaping dance. “See those balls? Each one has a letter, a B or an I for instance, as well as a number stamped on it. One ball will pop out at a time and the caller will yell out what’s on it. As soon as you hear the letter, you look in that column for the number.” Bernard stares at me, completely uncomprehending. “What’s the point?” he asks.
“It’s just a game!” I sigh with exasperation, as this is a sore point between us. I love games. Family nights when I was a kid might have included a round of Clue, in which I was always Col. Mustard, or better still a round of Scrabble, which is how I learned the difference between “sergeant” and “surgeon,” two words which, when spoken in my father’s Austrian accent, sounded identical. On vacations we packed cards, Yahtzee dice, and Mad Libs. When my sister and I weren’t playing dodge ball, hopscotch, or badminton, riding our bikes or trying to jump onto the top of the mailbox at the corner, we were sprawled on the floor playing Parcheesi, Life, pick-up sticks. My scant knowledge of geography, and the main reason I know the location of Irkutsk, stems from the hours we spent playing the board game Pirate and Traveler. In college, grad school, and later, I whiled away too many nights playing hearts, canasta, and cribbage, and have the modest grades to prove it.
Bernard can’t stand games, considers them a waste of time. But we’re on the Evangelistas and this is a time of change and renewal for both of us. I ignore that he’s shifting uncomfortably in his chair, getting his feet under him as if preparing to flee. I don’t give him a chance to utter a protest. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I continue. “The caller will tell you what pattern you have to fill in, like all the numbers under the letter ‘N,’ or a diagonal from the top left corner to the bottom right one. Listen to each number called out. Look for it on your card. Cover it with a chip if you find it. You’ll see. It’s fun!”
“G47,” the hostess calls out.
“What did she say? What do I do?” Bernard asks me, panicked. Here’s a man who can deconstruct a complex engine in his sleep, yet he’s relying on me to get him through the simplest of board games. I’m in heaven.
“B8. O65.” The engine’s hum and the buzz of two hundred Bingo players is making it difficult to hear.
“What? What is she saying?” He’s flummoxed by this most elementary of pastimes, a reaction I find totally endearing. But he’s competitive and this is a game where someone wins. By game two Bernard comes into his own, and I’m beside myself with pride when in game three he jumps to his feet shouting, “I’ve got it!”
“No, no. You’re supposed to yell BINGO.”
“Bean-go. Bean-go,” he shouts, flushing happily.
The caller checks his card and escorts us to the front where she hands him his prize: a bottle of Chilean red. Then the crew start stamping and clapping, making clear we’re now expected to sing for our supper. Or, more accurately, to dance for our wine. A huaso cueca, the music of Chile’s cowboys, blares over the loudspeakers. “Bernard,” I shout, “it’s like country swing!” This singer is no Willie Nelson, however. Feeling a bit like a scene cut from Pulp Fiction, we slip off our shoes and begin twirling, sashaying, and two-stepping as if our lives, not just our national pride, depended on it. I look to see if the judges are holding up a “10” for our performance but have to be satisfied with a bow to rousing applause from the raucous crowd of sloshed revelers. Our table is particularly happy to claim us as their own, especially when we open our winnings and pour wine all around.
At lunch on the second day, the captain announces that we’ll enter the notorious Golfo de Penas that evening. This is what I’ve been dreading, the one point at which we have to forsake our sheltered passage for the heaving swells of the open Pacific. In my experience, big waves and a rolling ship are a recipe for one thing only: being sick as a dog. I devote myself to ransacking my baggage for my Dramamine. An hour of frantic flinging of personal belongings later and I accept I’ve left it at home. I do still have one option to avoid spending hours heaving into the head: take a sleeping pill.
It’s antithetical to everything about me that I would resort to drugs in such situations. I live a healthy life with lots of physical activity and fresh air of the purest high altitude Rocky Mountain sort. We don’t suffer when it comes to freshly prepared meals either, despite no good restaurants within seventy miles of our ranch. With two refrigerators and three freezers, I’ve become exceptionally creative in managing a week’s worth of shopping and daily leftovers, to always have something tasty on the table, all of which I cook myself as my Mediterranean-inspired mother taught me.
When it comes to jetlag, however, I have long relied on the kindness of drugs. For someone whose medicine cabinet is so rarely opened that the medications in it are from the last century, there’s one simple reason for this: I want to enjoy my time abroad as quickly and with as much consciousness as possible. What I don’t want is to be the only one ready to party at 2:00 a.m. nor do I wish to sleep through the chance to taste the local breakfast. When I’m traveling I make it a point to be on the same rhythm as everyone around me.
I’ve done this for years, reading the travel columns, trying each new therapy as soon as it’s trending enough to warrant a review. During the P2P, when my mind raced with anxiety and fatigue like an engine revving in overdrive, I alternated between Benadryl and a half tab of Ambien at bedtime to quiet my mind enough to let me sleep. Each worked its charms, helping me maintain a civil, if not consistently cheerful, attitude for at least the first few hours of the day.
Since then, I’m all for doing what’s needed to keep myself comfortable and agreeable. If on occasion that means invoking pharmaceutical charms so that I sleep the sleep of the happily benumbed, I’m all for it. Now, breaking one tiny rectangular pill in half, I gulp it down with a sip of warm bottled water and crawl between the stiff white sheets of my berth, reaching my arm up to wish Bernard goodnight. When I awake the following morning, we’ve traversed the infamous gulf without incident.
The 930-mile inside passage from Puerto Montt, which is about midway down Chile’s long coastline, to Puerto Natales which is far to the south, is a revelation, at least when the view isn’t obscured by fog or rain. The region, known as the Chilean fjords, is a jigsaw puzzle of rocky islets, covered summit to shore with dense vegetation. From a distance they seem like a tropical paradise. As we glide through this lacy archipelago, we are sometimes only a hundred yards from shore and thus can see they are devoid of human or animal life. At one point, the captain steers the boat into a large hidden bay. The air turns sharply icy, as if we’ve entered some shoreline deep freezer. The fog lifts slightly off the surface of the water, just enough to reveal the source of the frigid air. It’s the tongue of an immense blue-white glacier, a sector of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field below which we’ve been sailing. The islands and the shore itself have risen so steeply that until now it’s been hidden from us. As the boat turns broadside to the ice, the glacier groans, as if in pain. Then a mighty turquoise blue ice floe calves off the base, collapsing into the water like a fat man into an easy chair. A series of waves ripples slowly outward, big enough to rock our small tanker like a plastic duck in a tub.
The three-and-a-half-day journey has an otherworldly feeling to it, as if we are slipping past phantom islands on a ghost ship. What with continually fogged windows, obscuring mists, and a bone-ch
illing dampness from the constant drizzle, I can’t keep my thoughts from turning to my dry, sunny Colorado home. This is not good. One of the reasons I devote so much brain space to my fantasies about an upcoming trip is because it’s hard for me to leave home. My daydreams steel me to be away from my bed, my pillow, my food, my view, my routine, all things which, in their bland material way, comfort me. Finding the fun in sleeping on a bed of concrete with a pillow that smells of someone else’s hair problems takes energy, as does enthusing over a plate of spicy gristle, or spending the day lost, sweating, and increasingly coated with muck. Yet I love our strange, unpredictable travels all the more for how they bring into sharp relief exactly what home means to me. Not just my home’s material comforts, but that ineffable sense of calm belonging, of splendid rightness when I cross the invisible boundary and re-enter my native space. A space whose every aspect and angle defines what I am in this world, a space which fits me as tightly and naturally as my skin. My home nurtures me as surely as do my home-cooked meals; to the extent I can leave it and then return with some new ingredients to add to my world, I keep enriching the broth of my life.
One benefit of a long road trip is that the perpetual change keeps me engaged as well as distracted. If something is too terrible one day, I know I can be somewhere else the next. On the Evangelistas, I’ve been in one place too long. The taciturn captain shows me evidence on a nautical chart that we are moving, but I can’t feel it. Worse yet, I can’t see it. Apart from the occasional petrel and a pod of Peale’s dolphins that briefly swim with the boat, the archipelago we glide through is uninhabited. Bernard’s much more present-minded than I am. He rarely gets entangled with “what ifs” when we travel, dealing with each new situation as it comes, without inferring future calamity because of it. Not me. While Bernard’s perky because he can get a pisco sour whenever he wants, my thoughts turn morbidly philosophical, like, “If there’s no one around to see us, do we really exist?” accompanied by its corresponding mood-lifter of, “If we disappeared right now, would anyone know?”
When the Evangelistas ties up at the Puerto Natales docks it’s a profound relief to retrieve our spry Suzuki, dump our bags in her trunk, and get back on the road. Any longer on board and I suspect we might have vanished into the mist altogether.
Kindness of Strangers
GHALAT, IRAN, 2016
Shahpur is trapped in one of life’s eddies, swirling down an ever tighter, lonelier, more desperate spiral. This puzzles me. Given how dire his circumstances are, how can he be so full of joy? And how is it that chickpeas can both sustain and utterly ruin him?
These questions enter later, though. When we meet Shahpur, chickpeas, mashed or otherwise, are the farthest thing from my mind, which instead is occupied with thoughts of worm-eaten apples and the stubborn perseverance of the elderly. To be precise, that of a woman whose every step speaks more clearly of what it takes to move forward with dignity than any globe-travelling diplomat could ever achieve, 747s and bespoke suits notwithstanding.
It’s late fall and we are near Shiraz, partway through a group road trip from Istanbul, Turkey on the Bosporus Strait which divides the Sea of Marmara from the Black Sea, to Bandar Abbas, Iran on the Strait of Hormuz which divides the Gulf of Oman from the Persian Gulf. The drive has been more arduous than we expected, with long days in the car to cover the thousands of miles before us, something we’re willing to accept because we’d longed to return to Iran since crossing the country from west to east in 2011. To embark on this trip requires us to ignore the potential perils following Turkey’s near-coup some months earlier. I remind myself that machine gun fire at roadblocks is something that happens to others, not me. I also extract a promise from Bernard that he will not diverge from our route to where the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) has street fighters, no matter how tempting the photo op may be. And we do see roadblocks and armored personnel carriers aplenty through Turkey, on one day being told not to proceed on pain of having our tires shot out.
While five years ago I entered Iran from Turkey with trepidation, on this trip crossing the border feels like a reprieve, entering what right then seems a haven of orderly calm: the Islamic Republic run by Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei has sat atop the power structure in Iran since 1989, so the country’s mode of government is forcefully stable. In a certain way it’s a relief that the ever-present issues defining America’s relationship with Iran are so entrenched they’ve hardly changed since I last was here. Five years ago this felt oppressive, but today, in comparison to the seismic upheavals in Turkey, it feels profoundly reassuring, despite how emphatically I disagree with the way Iran is run. Which just goes to show you that, when traveling, a sense of security is remarkably relative.
Today we’re in the old village of Ghalat. The distance we’ve driven intensifies my exuberance at being footloose. It’s just like the airy glee I felt on an elementary school snow day, a sense that without me doing anything to earn it, loads of fun await. Why? Because we’ll spend most of today indulging one of my favorite activities: meandering on foot. And that brings with it the potential for untold meetings, as unexpected and full of pleasure as that magical drift of snow outside my childhood bedroom when I awoke on a wintery Tuesday morning.
These wanderings are unpredictable. Nothing’s planned and nothing’s expected, not our path, not whether or where we’ll eat, not how long we’ll stay. I won’t know what will happen in this particular old village until it happens. If anything even does. We might not do more than wave at people, or we might encounter someone who changes my worldview forever.
The air here in southwestern Iran is smoky, the sun mild and warming. When we peer over a wall from the lane above we see a woman swathed in black. She’s poking with her walking stick at hand-scraped canals weaving through her garden, among fruit trees half-clothed in dying leaves, a fond remembrance of a lush summer. Her black scarf has slid half off, revealing thick steel-gray hair, more a tossed-on protection from possible chill than a strictly correct garment of Sharia law. The problem she faces is obvious from the black stain of water dribbling down the cobbled alley outside her garden wall: her shallow ditches are choked with lazily drifting yellow leaves and the water that should be sustaining her orchard is dampening the street dust instead.
She’s eighty-five, she tells us, belying her barely lined face with its clear skin and bright eyes. She reaches for low-lying tree branches, apologizing that she is too poor to invite us in. The hem of her black dress drags through an ochre leaf carpet as she picks four small apples and hands them up to us over the high wall. She apologizes further, for the worms that have gotten to them first. Her children, a doctor, an engineer, come sometimes, she explains. They prefer the city, though, while she prefers the quiet of this, her family village. She sighs. She pokes the ground. She resumes her slow clearing of leaves, one modest scratch at a time.
But back to chickpeas—as ubiquitous in Iranian cuisine as potatoes are to middle-American stockpots. Like potatoes they pack more in the way of minerals than any sand-colored, pointy-bottomed orb has any right to do. And just like a celebrity glimpsed without makeup or styling before the Oscars, they transform nicely when the occasion warrants. Cooked slow they become soft and as soothing as my mother’s cool hand on my forehead when I had a fever during grade school (after that I was an irascible teenager and wouldn’t let her touch me), adding substance to a lean meal and in so doing perhaps to a lean life as well.
As I nibble around the wormholes in my apple I have no idea I’m about to learn that chickpeas have a mission in life wholly unrelated to eating, which is this: chickpeas also serve as unit of weight and measure. People the world over use what’s handy and inarguably replicable to confirm the agreed portion of what they’re selling. In the Kalewa market along Myanmar’s Chindwin River they use a D cell battery to weigh a portion of fish; in Ethiopia repurposed plastic bottles of Fanta line roadside fuel stands, as uniform as soldiers on parade, confirming
an exact liter of petrol for the 150cc motorbikes that buzz the roads like a fresh hatch of mosquitos. In Iran, it’s the chickpea, which long has led a secret double life as unit of measure. This is because there are a lot of them in the country, the seventh largest producer of chickpeas in the world. These little beige orbs with the nutty flavor and buttery texture pack a huge punch when it comes to nutrition, especially in things like antioxidants and fiber. They make their way into much of Persian cuisine with the added bonus that they help you feel full even though you haven’t eaten much. Just like any other pulse or legume, one chickpea is indistinguishable from another. A lentil is a lentil is a lentil. So is a chickpea. Their very sameness makes them the ideal measure for another popular substance: opium.
As I learn later, the similarities between me and a chickpea of raw opium are disconcerting. For instance, both of us have undertaken quite a journey to get to Ghalat. For me, it meant more than sixty hours of driving from Iran’s northwest juncture with Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, through mountains so desiccated and rugged that for millennia they guarded themselves. Now, in the age of drones, it requires soldiers at key passages to keep Iranians in and Iraqis out, soldiers with big guns and aggressive struts, who prefer to point rather than palaver. In the past week of driving we’ve traversed mountains so forbidding, plains so dry, drought-broken riverbeds so devoid of even the tiniest ripple of water, that I had to wonder why anyone would bother trying to conquer such a place, let alone expend manpower to hold onto it for centuries as the Safavid and Sassanid kings did. Perhaps they recognized it for what it was: a great place to grow chickpeas.
