Following the Sun (2 page)

Rafe was the only African-American on the ship's crew and one of the highest-ranking officers. He had green eyes and an aquiline nose, but I supposed from the slight ripple of tension that we experienced in a small local diner that afternoon that his crisp hair and chocolate-colored skin were enough to classify him. Rafe did not seem to notice; he rambled on in his discursive way with stories of his adventures at sea and his wild bicycle rides along the dusty roads of the various developing countries where his ship would dock. He came from a small village in upstate New York, went through high school longing for the sea—which for no especially good reason sometimes strikes twelve-year-old boys—and then entered the American Maritime Academy. He had worked on all manner of ships, and had had no small number of adventures.

On one of his first voyages, shortly after graduation, he had a watch that required him to circulate the ship at night and cut, or otherwise cast overboard, the grappling hooks and lines of sea pirates in the South China Sea who would come alongside in small boats and throw lines over the rail and then clamor up to break into the containers that were stored on deck. On one occasion he happened upon the pirates scurrying along the deck and was attacked by knife-bearing Sea Dayaks, in the style of a Conrad character. He drove them off by firing over their heads and allowed them to scramble back down to their small boats.

With the weather clear and the seas calm, for the first time I began meeting some of my fellow passengers. They emerged from the cabins, looking gaunt and pale. There was an older retired couple from Pennsylvania whose custom was to travel the world by freighter. They would sign on and then stick with the vessel until it stopped at an American port close enough for them to catch a bus back to Pennsylvania. After a few months of recovery, they would find another ship and set out again. In this manner, there was hardly a place in the world they had not been.

There was one other passenger other than myself who was not ill from the heavy seas, a woman of about thirty, named Dickey, who was from New York City and was crossing by freighter to buy antique furniture. Dickey was fond of marijuana and smoked on deck each night, after dinner, carefully walking to the leeward side so as to have the smoke carried away and not tempt the crew. She had reddish, hennaed hair, smooth, creamy skin, and green eyes, and for all the world could not figure out why I would want to ride a bicycle from southern Spain to Scotland when I could rent a car.

“It would be so much easier,” she said. “And bikes are dangerous.”

She had lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years and had learned to hate bicycles. “Silent killers” she called them.

It was no use explaining my desire to be close to the sun.

Dickey, it turned out, had a mother on board, who only now, after a day or two of calm, emerged from her cabin. The two of them were headed to Cádiz and from there they were intending to travel on to Portugal to buy their furniture, which they would then ship back to New York from Lisbon to sell in their shop. Seasickness notwithstanding, they liked traveling by sea.

On one of these calm days I saw another new passenger, an Arab man standing by the starboard rail with a radio clapped to his ear, smiling broadly at some private information. He swept the radio away and held it out when he saw me approach. “Listen,” he said. “Arab music. The first time in years, I hear Arab music.”

We were now close enough to the North African coast to catch the local radio stations.

In some ways, this solar transit was the culmination of a lifelong pilgrimage. I had long been in thrall to the sun and this devotion began, as all true religions do, in my youth, in a consecrated place.

Every Sunday of my childhood, I was forced to dress in a hair shirt, that is to say, an itchy wool suit, and was banished to an uncomfortable wood pew set beneath a vaulted ceiling with dark, soaring beams. Here, for what seemed like half of one of the only two days I had free from that other prison—school—I sat fidgeting while my old father, a well-read Episcopalian minister, delivered seemingly interminable sermons. All natural light was obscured in this place. Through winter, spring, summer, and fall, the bright sun cast a distorted, broken image through stained glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ—innocent lambs holding crosses, virtuous donkeys bearing the Virgin and Child, and white-bearded men dressed in what I always thought were their bathrobes.

Much to my father's dismay I was an irreligious child, and by way of entertainment during these long services, my friends and I would sometimes mumble prayers to idolatrous gods—prayers to the Buddha, to Shiva, Mohammed, or our favorite, the Great Spirit of the Sioux, Wakahntanka. This sacrilege came to a head one brilliant autumnal Sunday when the leaves in the landscaped church grounds were in their full glory and the earth was moist with night rain. I was suffering through yet another two-hour confinement while my father read from an account of St. Paul's missionary work as recorded in Acts.

In his travels through Greece, Paul had come across an altar dedicated to an unknown god, and he announced that he now intended to declare that god to the people of Athens. For once, I was listening, and I began to wonder who this god could be; he sounded more attractive than the one my father was always talking about. Paul explained that this unknown deity was Jesus Christ. But as my father read on, the pallid image of the autumn sun crossed one of the stained glass windows. It suddenly struck me that the real god of all things, the unknown god of the Greeks, was not Jesus, or Mohammed, or even Wakahntanka, but this giver of all light, this force of all rivers and streams and cataracts, the driver of weathers, the creator of heaven and earth, our own star Sun.

I was only twelve and had a limited worldview.

Years later in college, in order to fulfill a dreaded science requirement, I enrolled in a course entitled Astronomy 101. The course was supposed to be about the physics of the universe, but the professor had a bias toward the history of astronomy and spent many of the lectures discussing arcane and interesting facts, such as the startling physiognomy of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had lost his nose in a sword fight and wore a golden nose as replacement.

This same professor was an avowed atheist, and when he came to the section of the course devoted to our own solar system, he introduced his lecture with an uncharacteristic theological discourse. “If you wish to bow down to some god,” he said, and here he lowered his head with mock solemnity, “then bow down to the sun. It is the source of all life on earth, the nearest any of us will ever come to experiencing a creator.”

This seemed to confirm my childhood suspicions about the nature of the sun, but at the time the closest I came to solar worship involved sacrilegious pilgrimages to beaches where—callow youth that I was—I joined other celebrants and adulates, stripped bare to better appreciate the salubrious rays of this god. I would end the summer as thoroughly bronzed as one of Joseph Conrad's marauding Sea Dayaks.

In time I settled down, acquired land, and assumed the role of a country gardener, thereby coming even closer to the beneficent earthly effects of this compassionate deity. During this time, I became acutely conscious of the seasonal cycles of the sun, and its stepchild, the weather. I came to know exactly where, at a certain hour on a certain day in a certain season, the sun would cast a shadow in the garden; in fact I could tell time without a clock simply by observing the position of the sun in relation to certain trees or rocks on my land. I became obsessed with light. I found myself unwilling—almost unable—to go to seven o'clock movies between April and October for fear of losing out on precious minutes of sunlight. I began to dread certain appointments for fear of being drawn indoors to some windowless, sealed office whilst the visage of my lord shewed forth in all his summer glory. I even came to dislike luncheon engagements between April and October, except at restaurants with outdoor seating.

In time, this obsession began to coalesce into a more conscious spiritual devotion to the sun. I began reading ancient, sacred texts, translations of prayers to the sun, and obscure anthropological and archeological accounts of the solar practices of long dead cultures from around the world. Slowly it came to me that the sun really is a god, at least as god is defined in the texts of so many religions. It is the creator of all things, the prime mover, the only god we can ever actually know, as my professor used to say.

Now, at last, in order to make a more conscious union with this deity, I was ready to undertake a pilgrimage. On the day of the vernal equinox, one of the four most sacred days in the solar calendar, I would begin cycling north with the increasing light, traveling at an easy pace of about twenty-five miles or so a day. In this way I calculated, I would move north with the European spring, along with the blossoming of flowering plants and the migrating birds and arrive at Callanish in time for the summer solstice, when this great chariot of fire reaches its northernmost point in the east, rides high above the earth, and then descends at the northwesternmost point in its annual journey.

For three more days the weather held calm and steady. And then, shortly after dawn on our eleventh day at sea, we saw the low-lying, green coast of Spain. There, spreading out ahead of us was the white port of Cádiz. The vessel slowed and then anchored offshore to wait for the flooding tide, while flocks of little gulls wheeled around us, mewing and crying. By four that afternoon, we were towed to the quayside. Carts rumbled across the cobblestone quay pushed by men in blue coveralls. There was much scrambling, many arguments and shouting and many inefficiencies and discussions, and arms thrown here and there. Well-attired officials in white uniforms trooped aboard in a line, set up a little wooden table near one of the passageways, and officiously checked our papers, and by five o'clock we had cleared customs and I rolled the old Peugeot down the gangplank to start my journey.

Following the Sun

One

Genesis

By ten o'clock on the morning of the twenty-first of March, two days after I arrived in Cádiz, having purchased for this leg of the journey a bottle of
vino tinto
, water, an onion, some tomatoes, and the round little loaves of bread called
pan duro
, I set out for the Hebrides.

From the San Fernando district, I skirted the tidal flats of Cádiz and headed around the bay to Puerto Real and thence, taking back roads, began northward for the town of El Puerto de Santa María. The traffic thinned once I extricated myself from the city, and I began passing freshly plowed fields and shallow ponds with spiky green spears of grass and croaking frogs. I pedaled along at a slow pace, smelling the morning air, dreaming of the things to come.

All about me there were birds: white storks, ringed plovers, lapwings, and beside the road, stonechats, chaffinches, and sparrows flitting in the shrubbery and wagtails at the pond edges. The smell of the fresh earth and fresh-cut herbage crowded in on me as I sped onward, and the sun was warm, and I felt that I was once more in touch with the actual earth, with a humane, accessible world, as opposed to the cold, watery life at sea. It was all violets and sweet days and the heralding of birds, and the brown hills melting into green.

This was easy riding, no wind, and the countryside was flat, and I clipped along, pacing off the miles comfortably. There were periods on this stretch when I could see nothing around me but greening fields, olive groves, distant, white-washed farm buildings with red roof tiles, pastures with grazing black bulls, and blue-green hills rising up higher to the east.

Not far outside the city I began riding by bands of country folk, mostly women, headed to or from the fields. They wore wide-brimmed straw hats held in place with white bandannas tied beneath their chins, and they all had round, nut-brown faces, with rosy cheeks and white teeth, and many of them wore full-cut blue or brown skirts and heavy shoes. Some carried mattocks over their shoulders, and they whistled and waved as I sailed by and shouted out phrases that I couldn't quite catch, possibly wishing me luck, possibly off color.

This retreat into the past was periodically broken by hurricanes of passing trucks, as well as whiney little cars that would whip by and then disappear like dreams over the horizon. The road was narrow here and the shoulders were rough gravel, or in some places lined with deep, grassy ditches dotted with suspicious frogs. Except for the cars and trucks, I rode on in peace, alone with the solitude of the seven-hundred-year reign of the Caliphate and the jackdaws in the groves, lapwings in the fields, the dashing flights of kestrels, and the ever-present flickings of sparrows and chaffinches in the brush.

I was purposely taking a small road to El Puerto, as I intended to do during this whole journey, and after a pleasant hour of this circuitous, inland wandering, I retired to a nearby olive grove to rest in the shade. Here I opened a bottle of water, ate an orange, and listened to the bird songs and the whinny of a distant horse and imagined myself free at last, a rambler out on the road, cut loose, the happy wayfarer, out on a splendid sojourn.

Most pilgrims know exactly the route they will take to their destinations. I had no particular itinerary. My main fix was time; I wanted to be at the stone circle of Callanish on the evening of the twenty-first of June to watch the sundown. My intention was to pedal along on small roads until the summer solstice, and then turn around and head home. Other than that, I had no route, no reservations, and no exact date of return; in fact I didn't know how I would return.

Where I would sleep each night would be a matter of chance. I was traveling light on this expedition, two panniers packed with a few changes of clothes, maps, bicycle tools, and a small backpack stocked with a few things I might need during the day. Lunch, extra clothes, water, and wine were fixed astern on a little rack over the back wheel, and in this manner I forged on, confident that I could find whatever else I needed along the way. I would be burning an inordinate number of calories on this journey and therefore would be able to indulge myself in the local foods and wines of France and Spain. I would ride all day, and then, fully exercised, roll into a pleasant rural town, find a heavy-beamed
auberge
or pension, top up with a local country repast, a bottle of fine local wine, and a good cheese for dessert, and then retire to my bed to sleep the sleep of the healthy and the just. At least that was the idea. My first night in Cádiz had not offered an auspicious beginning, however.