Holidays in Heck (3 page)

I say, “Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.”

“We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,” they reply.

This doesn't work worth a damn with the TSA.

Then there's the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he's had. Personally—and I'm sure I'm not alone in this—I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It's worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I'm annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I'm being crabby about it. Writers
of travelogues are most entertaining when—to the infinite amusement of readers—they have bad things happen to them. I'm afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.

That's not hard for me. What is this thing called fun? To judge by traveling with my wife and daughters it has something to do with shopping for clothes. But I already have clothes; otherwise I'd be standing there in Harrod's naked. Or maybe it has to do with eating in fancy restaurants. I like a good meal and often, in the midst of one, I'll begin to reminisce about dining on raw lamb brains in Peshawar, and suddenly nobody's eating. There is the romantic side of a romantic getaway to be considered. Mrs. O. got quite snuggly on a moonlit night in Venice in the back of one of those beautiful teak
motoscafo
water taxis, speeding from the Piazza San Marco to Lido beach. Speaking for myself, however, I'd just as soon be home in bed without the lagoon sewage spray and the boat driver sneaking peeks. And a kid's idea of fun is a frightening amusement park ride. I'm a professional coward. I make my living by being terrified. I shouldn't pay somebody when I get on Space Mountain; somebody should pay me when I get off.

The word “fun” is not found anywhere in the Bible—no surprise to a Catholic. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
“fun” first occurs circa 1700 as slang for a trick, hoax, or practical joke. It may derive from the Middle English “fon,” meaning to cheat. Dr. Johnson called it “a low cant word.”

In his
Dictionary of Catch Phrases,
the eminent lexicographer Eric Partridge lists a number of expressions concerning fun. They don't indicate that much is being had. “Ain't we got fun!” comes from the lyrics of a 1920 song by Richard A. Whiting: “Not much money,/But, oh, honey,/Ain't we got fun!” Probably not for long. “Having fun?” is a question posed
only to those who clearly aren't. A more kindly version is the existential query that the cartoonist Bill Griffith had Zippy the Pinhead make, “Are we having fun yet?” which Eric Partridge died too soon to note. “It's all good clean fun” means it isn't. And we mustn't forget “more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” How long have the monkeys been in the barrel? Does the barrel have airholes?

Googling “fun” in March 2011, I got, first: “Due to a scheduling conflict,
fun
will not be performing at the June 25th Panic at the Disco show in Portland, OR.” And, second: “FunBrain is the #1 site for online educational games for kids of all ages (math, grammar, science, spelling, history).”

And
Bartlett's
has only a dozen quotations concerning fun, none of which are fun to quote except a stanza from the poem “Hi!” by Walter De la Mare, which takes me back to my days as a shithole specialist:

The Galápagos Islands, April 2003

I
t is sometimes thought that Republicans are not environmentally conscious, that we are not concerned about the planet or, as we call it, the outdoors. This is not true. We love the outdoors and carefully instruct our children in its manifold splendors. For example, the son of a Republican friend of mine, when asked by his preschool teacher if he could name the four seasons, proudly said, “Dove, ducks, deer, and quail!”

We Republicans respect and revere the natural world—and all its natural laws and truths we hold to be self-evident. We're particularly respectful of that aspect of the natural world known as Darwinian selection, whatever you may have heard to the contrary in our churches. Creationism is all well and good on Sunday, but it's “survival of the most
market-oriented” the rest of the week and also in the voting booth. Thus it was that some Republican friends of mine and I made a pilgrimage to that ecological treasure and living monument to Charles Darwin, the Galápagos Islands.

Several million years ago the Galápagos Islands popped, volcanically, out of the Pacific Ocean. The South American mainland being 600 miles away and nothing else nearby, each island was a tabula rasa. Various birds, lizards, sea mammals, and seeds blew in and washed up. Biological colonization occurred by dumb luck. Very dumb luck, to judge by how the local critters flap, crawl, and paddle up and present themselves to visiting omnivore bipeds for examination of gustatory potential. Pirates, whalers, and other nonmembers of the World Wildlife Federation had an estimated 100,000 friendly, curious Galápagos giant tortoises for lunch.

Isolation allowed unusual life-forms to flourish. It's an experiment we all made, when we were single, with Chinese take-out left in the refrigerator for six months. Interesting what happens when all the ecological niches except the shelf the beer is on are empty. General Tso's chicken can develop into something that fills the whole fridge. Darwin may have noticed this in the fridge of the HMS
Beagle
. Anyway, when the
Beagle
arrived in the Galápagos, Darwin—perhaps after a heavy lunch of giant tortoise and beer—formulated his theory of evolution, which may be restated for Republicans as: If you're slow and edible and I have a gun, the situation will evolve.

Unfortunately, now that the
Beagle
has been decommissioned, going to the Galápagos in style is something of a problem. For
the most part the only way to see the islands is as a tourist on a cruise. There is a kind of tourist who takes this kind of cruise. This tourist loves nature in unnatural ways. An awful prospect presented itself of vegan fare at the captain's table and conversation about earth being in the balance, never mind that the earth has a mass of 5.97 × 10
²⁴
kilograms while Al Gore weighs little more than 250 pounds.

Fortunately, I know a Texan couple with the Texan energy and Republican ingenuity needed to tackle this downside of a Galápagos excursion. George and Laura (not their real names) spent a year juggling the busy schedules of fifty-some pals who adore nature's glories especially when a covey of them is pointed by our bird dogs. George and Laura then balanced the juggled schedules with the sailing dates of the MS
Polaris,
owned by that paragon organizer of exotic trips, Lindblad Expeditions. We arrived in the Galápagos not as tourists but as a floating house party. We had booked the whole ship. A vessel that might have flown the Greenpeace unjolly roger now, in effect, hoisted the happy burgee of a yacht. If our dinner seating included members of PETA, we could tell the cruise director, “Throw these vegetarians to the sharks!” Not that Lindblad Expeditions has cruise directors. Lindblad has naturalists with advanced degrees in wildlife biology. Each day these guides took us, by Zodiac boats, to a different Galápagos island. There they delivered talks on Galápagos flora and fauna, giving us important ecology lessons.

On Fernandina Island, our guide said, “The vestigial wings of the flightless cormorant evolved due to a lack of natural predators.” Significant glances were exchanged among my shipmates. Being Republicans, we
are
natural predators. A nearby flightless cormorant spread stumpy and functionless
appendages that looked to make him eligible for membership in the Feather Club for Birds.

“That's what happens to you without free-market competition,” said Laura.

“The flightless cormorant is endemic to the Galápagos islands of Fernandina and Isabela,” said our guide. (“Endemic” is wildlife biologist talk for “doesn't get out much” or “stuck there.”)

“Notice how close we can get to the birds, even when they are nesting,” our guide continued. “This is because they have no experience with humans; they are truly wild.”

“Of course!” said a Dallas lawyer. “I should have realized that a long time ago—in my junior year of college—wild equals stupid.”

It was an insight that dominated shipboard sundowner gin and tonic chatter.

“Into the stupid blue yonder.”

“Call of the stupid.”

“Stupid Kingdom.”

“Stupid thing, you make my heart sing, you make everything . . . stupid.”

The Galápagos are an Ecuadorian national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Strict preservation of the pristine stupidity of the wilderness allowed us to experience a close communion with the animal world that you can't get even from Rover, no matter how stupid he is. The endemic waved albatross let us in on its every Dr. Phil moment. The birds mate for life, then immediately separate. They go off alone for months at sea and return to Española Island in the Galápagos to breed. But before the albatross husband gets back together with his albatross wife, he rapes the other wives. There is an elaborate reconciliation with squawking
and slapping of beaks ending in mutual embrace—perfect for daytime bird television. They have an egg, probably to strengthen the relationship. Then they take turns sitting on it for up to a week at a time. When Al Junior is hatched he gets as much as four and a half pounds of food regurgitated down his throat in a single feeding. By five months the chick weighs more than its parents. Feminist issues, family leave, childhood obesity—on Española we had found a place where Hillary Clinton truly could make a difference.

Speaking of objects of ridicule, there is the foolishly waddling, risibly yclept blue-footed booby. The boobies' webbed toes are as funny-colored as a UN flag. Their mating dance is a disco polka. They give each other pebbles.

Boobies share their inshore feeding waters with the noble frigate bird. The frigate birds soar and loop on vast scimitar wings and grace the sky with acrobatics. It's impossible not to admire the one and disparage the other, until it's time for work. The boobies are skilled divers. Plunging from 100 feet in the air into water sometimes only eighteen inches deep, they harvest whole schools of fish. Then the frigate birds grab the boobies by their tails in midair and bite them and shake them until the boobies cough up their food. “Back on the ground,” said our guide, “the male frigate birds have a very large red throat pouch which they puff full of air to attract . . .”

“Voters, I'll bet,” said a woman who'd survived a political appointment in the Bush père administration. “Observe the frigate birds,” she said, “and you know everything you need to know about Democratic presidential candidates.”

“The blue-footed boobies need re-branding,” said a marketing consultant from New York. “Those feet—they've a skateboard sneaker franchise crying out for a licensing deal.”

“Look,” said our guide, “a lava gull.” He pointed to a bird that was more like a dove than the airborne sanitation engineer that we call a gull. “They're very rare,” said the guide, “maybe only four hundred in the world.”

“They must be delicious,” said one of our more avid bird-hunters. Our shipboard party was of the opinion that extinction probably has as much to do with flavor as with pollution or climate change. Whenever a new creature was spotted, our first question was, “How do they taste?”

It took all week to get one of our guides to admit that he knew how giant tortoise tastes. Not personally, of course, but he was born in the Galápagos and “a long, long time ago my parents had some.”

“Well?” we said.

“Good.”

The food on the
Polaris
was good, too, albeit lacking in turtle chops and breast of lava gull. The crew was cheerful. The cabins were not too boat-size. And every night the Lindblad guides delivered further informative talks on Galápagos flora and fauna, giving us more important ecology lessons.

Some of us preferred to spend the evenings on the fan-tail in consultation with Professor Dewar's and Dr. Monte Cristo. Inside, a Lindblad guide was explaining how young the Galápagos Islands are, in geological time. Outside, George was suggesting that setting our watches to geological time could lessen stress and keep
us
young. “I'll get back to you on that right away—in geological time.”

Mornings we snorkeled—an abrupt and effective hangover cure. Commercial fishing is banned in the Galápagos. The island waters are a fish Calcutta. So many giant angel-fish appeared that I felt like the bubbling deep-sea diver in the aquarium of a pet store that just can't make a sale.
Tiny, silver pizza-toppers swam in schools the size of Little Italy. Parrot fish, damselfish, and wrasses exhibited the same obliviousness to our presence as the wave albatross and, mercifully, so did the white-tipped sharks (who'd already gorged themselves, perhaps, on vegetarians). Manta rays in watery flight winged by and had a look, as did gringo fish, so called by the locals because they're pale in the water and turn bright red in the sun.