Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (40 page)

2008

SEEING THE WORLD

“In the fifties, when my mother began lobbying for a trip to Europe, my father, who had been brought to Missouri from the Ukraine when he was two, said, ‘I been.’ ”

Before Alice and I left for a visit to the Sicilian resort town of Taormina, I consulted
Sunny Sicily
for the observations of Mrs. Alec Tweedie, a rather severe travel writer of late-Victorian times who was also the author of
Through Finland in Carts
and, before she caught on to the value of a snappy title,
Danish Versus English Butter Making
. I can’t imagine why some people say that I don’t have a scholarly approach to travel.

Writing in 1904, Mrs. Tweedie summed up Taormina like this: “The place is being spoilt.” It’s the sort of comment that can give pause to a traveler who is considering a visit to Taormina somewhat later in the century. Mrs. Tweedie’s conclusion that Taormina was being ruined by an influx of English and Americans must have been made, after all, at about the same time the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk—and neither she nor the Wright brothers could have had any notion of the impact of super-saver fares. There was no way for me to know whether or not Mrs. Tweedie had been one of those people who simply seem to take great pleasure in telling you that they can recall the time when the place you’re about to visit—any place you’re about to visit—was actually okay. (“Pity about the Marquesas. I remember thinking years ago that if that semimonthly prop service from Fiji ever started, that would be it.”)

Still, even though Mrs. Tweedie complained bitterly that “the natives have lost their own nice ways,” she had to admit that Taormina was “one of the most beautiful spots on earth,” an ancient town perched high on a mountain overlooking the Ionian Sea. Also, I had reason to believe that Mrs. Tweedie’s standards in matter of spoilage were stricter than my own. She sounded as if she might fit comfortably among those travelers whose measure of authenticity is so exacting that they tend to find even the ruins ruined.

Taormina, in fact, happens to have a noted ruin—a Greek theater where what must have been the cheap seats command such a spectacular view of the sea that I can imagine Aristophanes and Euripides sitting around some playwrights’ hangout commiserating with each other on how hard it is to hold a Taormina audience’s attention. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Tweedie did find that ruin ruined. The Greek theater, she wrote, “is really Roman, as the Romans completely altered it.” I have nothing against the Romans myself. How is it possible to dismiss a culture that handed down penne all’Arrabbiata? Also, I was, of course, traveling with a connoisseur of views. I always seem to be particularly intent on pleasing Alice during Italian vacations, even if that requires taking in what I would think of as a plethora of views. It may have grown out of my custom of calling her the
principessa
whenever we’re traveling in Italy. At some point I found that it improved the service at the hotels.

By Mrs. Tweedie’s standards, the natives of Taormina must have lost their own nice ways years before she marched briskly into the piazza, wearing, as I have always envisioned her, a tweed suit, sensible walking shoes, and an authoritative expression. At the time of this first inspection, the British had been coming to Taormina for thirty years. A visit by Wilhelm II of Prussia made it popular with European royalty, and, when Mrs. Tweedie was probably still skidding around Finland in a cart, Taormina was picking up a reputation as a place that appealed to writers and artists and assorted genteel bohemians. It almost goes without saying that D. H. Lawrence once lived there. Having had D. H. Lawrence residences pointed out to me all over the world, I can only wonder how he got any writing done, what with packing and getting steamship reservations and having to look around for a decent plumber in every new spot. I suspect, though, that Taormina’s reputation for harboring exotics comes less from Lawrence than from a German nobleman named Wilhelm von Gloeden, who arrived at about the same time as Wilhelm II and started taking what became well-known photographs of Sicilian boys—some dressed as ancient Greeks, some dressed as girls, and some not dressed at all.

Late in the evening, as I sat in one of the outdoor cafés on Taormina’s principal piazza, where one café uses enlargements of von Gloeden photographs to decorate its walls, my thoughts sometimes turned from Sicilian almond pastry to the possibility that von Gloeden and Mrs. Tweedie met in Taormina. The street that dominates the town—the Corso Umberto, a strolling street that bans cars except during early-morning delivery hours—couldn’t have changed much from the days when there were no cars to ban, except that in Mrs. Tweedie’s time the industrial revolution had not progressed to the point of providing Corso Umberto shops with souvenir T-shirts that say
I MAFIOSI TAORMINA
. The piazza, known as Piazza Nove Aprile, is a wide spot about halfway down the Corso Umberto where a gap in the buildings along one side of the street for a few hundred feet presents a stunning view of the sea. The jacaranda trees must have been there then, and I suspect the bench alongside the sixteenth-century church was lined with the very same nineteenth-century old folks, sternly watching the evening strollers as if collecting vicarious sins to confess the next day.

I could easily imagine the encounter. Suddenly a man at one of the cafés stands up, trying to keep his composure while gathering up the bulky cameras and tripod he always carries with him. “I really don’t see what concern it is of yours, madam,” he says in heavily accented English.

Too late. Mrs. Tweedie is bearing down on him, brandishing the umbrella that made a porter in Palermo sorry that he complained about what had been a perfectly adequate sixpence tip. Von Gloeden bolts from the café, knocking down a portly mustachioed man (Wilhelm II of Prussia) and caroming off an ice-cream vendor as he races down the street. Mrs. Tweedie is gaining on him.

“Shame! Shame!” she shouts as she waves the lethal umbrella above her head. “Shame on you, you wicked, wicked man!”

1981

1992

The world’s highest tides are in the Minas Basin—at the end of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia. I’ve been there. Did I see the high tides? Well, my wife and I certainly showed up at the shore, eager to see what the Minas Basin people had to offer in the way of tides. But how, exactly, do you look at a high tide? If it’s in, it just looks like water. If it’s out, looking at it is like observing some guy who bills himself as the person who has lost the most weight of anyone in the greater Cleveland area: To make a go of it, he’d pretty much have to have a way to show you what he looked like as a fatty. I don’t mean to imply that folks along the Minas Basin would say that a bunch of mudflats are under water at high tide if it weren’t true, but you can’t be too careful these days.

Usually, something that’s the highest or deepest or biggest is easy to spot. If you go to Pittsburgh and you want to see the largest revolving door in the world, for instance, you just ask anyone where it is. Then you can stand in front of it and say things like “Well, that’s a big revolving door, all right” or “In Houston, we got a whole mess of revolving doors bigger’n that” or “I wonder if that fat guy in Cleveland could have fit in that revolving door.”

But it takes six and a half hours for a tide to change from high to low, or vice versa, and the difference between high and low is actually the attraction you’re supposed to observe. I could envision us lined up with other tourists at some lookout point designated by the tourist commission as one of the best places to get a look at the highest tides in the world. The tide is just going out. In six and a half hours, we’re going to see a dramatic difference. After about an hour, the man next to me says, “You folks from Indiana?”

“No,” I say.

He nods his head, as if my answer made a certain amount of sense.
After a while, he says, “Used to have some cousins in Indiana. Unless it was Illinois.” I look at my watch. We’ve got five and a half hours to go. I try to keep in mind that the word the tourist commission keeps using for these tides is
dramatic
.

My wife broke into this reverie. “It says in the brochure that at high tide on certain days we could look for a tidal bore,” she said.

“Not on your life!” I said. I happened to know what the brochure meant by a tidal bore: It’s the phenomenon that occurs when a strong incoming tide in a place like the Minas Basin meets the current of a river that is flowing into the sea. But before I realized that, I occasionally passed signs on the highway in Nova Scotia that said
TIDAL BORE
, and I assumed they were warning motorists about the presence of someone lurking around there waiting to tell you a whole lot more about tides than you ever wanted to know.

Whenever I saw a
TIDAL BORE
sign, I jammed my foot on the accelerator. Even after the true meaning was explained to me, I couldn’t get over the idea that a living, talking tidal bore was just waiting to tell me at great length about the connection of tides and the phases of the moon. I couldn’t get over the idea that another sign down the road might say
MILES PER GALLON BORE
. Then there would be a sign saying
TRIP TO EUROPE BORE
, and just off the road, half hidden by a clump of bushes, he’d be there, waiting. What’s that in his hand? A carrousel full of slides!

I wasn’t about to look for a tidal bore, and it occurred to me that we had another problem: We had arrived at half tide, meaning that seeing the extremes of high and low would require us to spend more than nine hours at the lookout, denying all the time that we were from Indiana.

I took another look at the water. “I think, in a manner of speaking, we’ve sort of seen it,” I said to my wife. “It was interesting.”

“Somehow, I don’t feel it was very dramatic,” she said.

“Someday,” I promised, “I’ll take you to see the biggest revolving door in the world.”

1990

I haven’t seen any of the mountains I was meant to see. That doesn’t sound right. That sounds like somebody saying, “Alas! I was born to see mountains, yet I have spent my entire life within the environs of Ottumwa, Iowa.” That is not what I mean. I mean that I have been in places where you’re supposed to see certain mountains, and I have not been able to see them. When I am in parts of France where the Alps are visible on a clear day, for instance, it is not a clear day. In Japan, I did not see Mount Fuji. I missed Mount McKinley in Alaska. From a splendid perch on the top row of an ancient amphitheater in Taormina, Sicily, I failed to see Mount Etna in the distance. In Tanzania, I was unable to make out Mount Kilimanjaro. There might have been snows on Kilimanjaro and there might not have been snows on Kilimanjaro. For all I know, Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner were still up there. I couldn’t see a thing.

There is no question that in each case I was in a spot from which the mountain is, in theory, viewable. When I realized that I was not going to see Mount Rainier, in fact, I was standing on the porch of the Mountain View Inn. Also, I would like to dispose at once of the notion that I might have actually seen the mountains in question and not recognized them as mountains. I know where that kind of talk comes from. It comes from people who know that I have never been able to see constellations. It is true that every time someone has said to me “There—can’t you see Orion’s Belt, starting with that bright star over on the left?” I have said “No, not really.” I have never seen Orion or his belt. I’ll admit that I wasn’t looking very hard for a while, since I thought for years that Orion was O’Ryan, and I considered the possibility of an Irish constellation unlikely. Even after I knew Orion’s name, though, I couldn’t see him. I don’t think the people who are always pointing him out to me can see him either. I think the constellation
business is purely arbitrary. I think there are just a bunch of stars up there. I think that if you said to one of the constellation people (in a sufficiently authoritative tone) “Good view of Athena’s dirndl tonight over there; you can even see where the hem’s coming loose,” he would nod sagely and say something about the natural wonders of the universe.