Life is a Trip (3 page)

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 trave
l
ing 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 slee
p
less night, after an equally sleepless night flight from the United States to Germ
a
ny.

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 a
n
nounced, “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 acknowled
g
ing our guilt about our travel mates who did not have the luxury of accommodations, we genuflected b
e
fore 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 co
m
bining 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 Chri
s
tine 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, al
t
hough not blended, harbored enough anger to e
n
compass four or five families at least.

The chaos of Christine’s children seemed to unnerve the more reserved of
f
spring of John’s former union. Lists of past hurts and ove
r
sights 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 unte
n
able. 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; Ru
s
sell refused to drive another inch until he had more “evidence” than a general d
i
rection in which to drive; Marta was communing with Spirit; Brandon was dru
m
ming, 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 certai
n
ly 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 cam
p
ers. 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 neg
o
tiating with the Crown for Ngati Awa claims, had been divorced, dealt with chi
l
dren, and had a pe
n
chant for fast cars and fast driving. Having seen and done it all, not
h
ing 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 be
l
low 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 avoi
d
ed conflict by singing. I, who am among the most direct of people, understood from the Maori elder that sometimes a circu
i
tous route can be more effective: song or play or joking or storytelling can so
f
ten a tough situation and make it manageable.

Shortly after I came home from the roots trip, I was, metaphorica
l
ly 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, ri
s
ing 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 su
p
port 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 ca
t
tycorner 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.

A
s far as I could tell
, the only thing Ed English was mis
s
ing 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 Ne
w
foundland. In late June to early July, it’s blessed with icebergs, whales, and Ed’s kayaks, which you can reserve at Ed’s ligh
t
house 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 a
n
ywhere 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 clic
k
ing 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.