©2004 UrbisMedia
At LA International Airport I introduced myself to the group that I would be escorting through Europe for the next thirty days. They were, as mostly they had come to be in the late 1980s, couples in that category the travel industry calls “mature travelers.” That made Doug an exception to the tour’s demographics.
At first I didn’t think he was one of our group. But he noticed me jotting something in my notebook, and told me he admired the leather cover I had on it to withstand the rigors of travel. Patty had the cover made for me years earlier, and many a notebook had worn the thick, brown hide with its Buffalo nickel snaps to keep it closed when not in use. Doug resolved to have one made for his notebooks when he returned home from this trip.
In that same conversation Doug revealed to me that he wanted to be a writer. He’d studied business in college, and went into ROTC afterward, neither of which satisfied, as he put it, his need to “have a more self-reflective life.”
He was from some unremarkable archipelago of suburban subdivision in LA’s carboniferous sea. Now, at twenty-seven, he and his less remarkable notebook were making their first foreign trip to Europe.
Doug was a compressed sponge, poised to absorb it all. Of slight build and pleasant looking, it seemed he would be easy and non-threatening for people to talk to, open up to, traits useful to a writer. What he required was “stuff” to write about, experiences and atmospheres, he said, and Europe promised plenty of that. I liked his “self-reflective” impulse, his yearning for new places and people and most of all, his desire to capture as much of it as he could in his notebook. I couldn’t help liking Doug; for in many ways he reminded me a little of myself, not too many years earlier.
Still, a package tour might not seem the ideal vehicle for a ‘wannabe’ Herodotus, Haliburton, or Hemingway. But an enterprising romantic traveler can make use of its conveniences and avoid enough of its constraints to achieve enough of that essential “solitary-strangerness” for reflection and inspiration.
As things turned out I didn’t see all that much of Doug beyond brief chats on the coach now and then, mostly answering his questions about where he might take an excursion off the tourist pathways. He avoided many of the group meals in the hotels and, as often happens with groups, his absences became the subject of speculation.
He therefore came to be regarded, in gossipy speculations, as “gay,” a “doper,” “anti-social,” or a “prowler of tenderloins.” Like most gossip, it was off the mark and said more about the authors than the subject. Doug had been spotted at the Tate Gallery in London, the Orsay in Paris, a café near Santa Croce in Florence, and always alone. Though he was friendly and helpful at the times he was obliged to be with the group, he volunteered no stories of shopping bargains, comments on the son et lumiere the evening before, or drooling descriptions of those topless French beachgoers at Nice. What his notebook recorded, I don’t know.
As I was bound to tour leader responsibilities, I envied Doug’s ability to get away from the pack. Some unusual experience might befall him, something I might read about in a novel or travel article years later. His absences didn’t alarm me. He seemed too smart to fall victim to a scam, a mugging, or pay twenty dollars for two drinks because the pretty girl who sat next to him at the bar was indeed a ‘student,’ but of the arts of Venus.
.
As it happened, however, it was Venus (or more appropriately her Olympic version, Aphrodite) that provided a dramatic turn to Doug’s quest for experience, in a very corporeal form. And it happened in the full view of the pack.
Our tour, after three all-too-frenetic weeks on the ground from London to Athens, was now ready to embark on what was billed as the “relaxation” phase of the trip: a week’s cruise in the Greek Isles. There is little need to note that cruise ships figure prominently in the lore of romantic travel. Select any cruise ship brochure or ad and young couples (and occasionally some fit and handsome older ones) nuzzle at the railings in crisp nautical casuals, cavort on disco floors, smile longingly at one another through champagne flutes, and frolic in pools and spas in attitudes foreshadowing the implied intimacies to come in their luxurious cabins. Primed with such images, the sentimental soul, bathed in sea air that Paris and Helen once respired, and with cares and ‘significant others’ back on some distant shore, the sentimental heart is easy prey to the legendary “shipboard romance”.
Our Austrian tour manager, Gerhardt, had managed, by some negotiation, to acquire some berths for his parents and two sisters, one of who, Lisl, taught English at an elementary school near Linz. She was perhaps a couple of years senior to Doug, but if that came up during the tetes-a-tete they were soon seen having at a table by the pool, or at the rail on the promenade deck, it didn’t seem to dampen what was beginning to look like a shipboard romance worthy of a cruise brochure.
Lisl was a pretty woman, though not in an obvious way. She was slim, and only mildly curvaceous, fair-complected, with a simple coif of short dark hair. It took a little study to see that she was very attractive in a wholesome, clear-eyed, and fine-featured way, much more the girl next door than the siren; though she might not always draw her drapes. She and Doug were the same height, as there was frequent opportunity to notice, and seemed to complement one another in other physical features.
Others on our tour saw it much the same way. There was no escaping the gossip, the prying eyes, the knowing smiles. Except for their escapes on rented bikes or mopeds when the ship called at Mykonos, Crete, or Rhodes, their every move was the subject of intense speculation, and no small amount of envy.
I can still see them in my mind the morning several of us arose early to get our Homeric “rosy-fingered-dawn” photos. The evening before we had gathered at the open air bar on the aft deck. We were passing the coast of Albania the barman informed us, although there were no lights on shore to be seen. Apparently the communist regime was so restrictive that even light could not escape from this black hole of the Balkans. We would be in the Ionian Sea in the morning, passing Ithaca, Odysseus’ home island. What better place for a Homeric sunrise on the “wine dark sea.”
From an evening of exchanging toasts with Italian grappa I learned that Gerhardt was on good terms with most of Europe’s bartenders and facile at finding occasions that ‘required’ alcoholic libation, brought a bottle of some sort of “schnapsi” rot gut to toast the sunrise. For a guy who was reputedly making his way through medical school between gigs as a tour manager Gerhardt seemed to be around rung five on the seven-step program to alcoholism. He had managed to ferret out a couple of boozers on the tour as regular bar company and arranged to keep the wine flowing so profusely at one of the group dinners in Tuscany that nearly the entire group had to be poured off the bus. The physician-to-be countered a complaint that he had allowed smoking on the return trip with his unique medical philosophy that “it would be a waste of life to die with a perfect body”. Gerhardt taught me how I might turn a tour into a non-stop party, but I also picked up the observation that travel can be good cover for people with problems of substance abuse.
About nine or ten of us showed up before sunrise, and I have to admit that the “schnapsi” stuff did serve to ward off the damp chill. Before it warmed my bones, I had been considering retiring to the coziness of my cabin bunk and later substituting a sunset photo since at sea it’s almost impossible to tell whether the sun is rising or setting.
Homer would have been pleased; the sun rose from the sea just the way it was supposed to, well, close enough for a blind poet. We snapped furiously as it sent a yellow-orange carpet rolling across the placid Adriatic straight at our ship. I had never dreamed those many years ago when I struggled with translating The Odyssey in Fr. White’s Classical Greek class that I would one day sail in Odysseus’ fabled wake, even if it was in a cruise ship. I was glad I decided against faking the sunrise photo. It was a high moment for me, lacking only a Penelope to share it, she being far away and, I trusted, fending off suitors until my return.
Some others were less moved to romantic reverie, or perhaps more fortified with the schnapsi stuff. There were waggish references to its being “a dawnzerly light” and the skies being “forspatious,” so I left my Philistine countrymen and headed up toward the Boat Deck, camera in one hand, a cup of the schnapsi stuff in the other.
It was when I came up the ladder to deck level that I saw them. Doug and Lisl were at the rail. They were staring longingly into one another’s eyes, their hands clasped, not in an embrace but at their sides, their bodies just touching.
I froze, not wanting to disturb their moment, but still wanting to witness it. I took a step down the ladder so that my eyes were just level with the deck. I watched, and as I did my memory raced back, not to “Penelope,” but to Gwen. [to be continued]
___________________________________
©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.15.2004)