Travel Writing Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Some Time Ago, with Contemporary Interludes

  Telling Stories

  Lydia and Lisa

  Dateline: Cuernavaca Mexico

  The Love Nazi

  Dateline: Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand

  Looking for Peter

  The Long, Cold Spring

  Dateline: Quetico, Ontario, Canada

  Finding Peter

  The Summer of Lisa Kim

  Back to School

  Some Time Later, with a Flashback and a Contemporary Interlude

  Dateline: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

  The Doctor

  Dateline: Doolin, County Clare, Ireland

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First Mariner Books edition 2009

  Copyright © 2008 by Peter Ferry

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Chapters one and two appeared in a slightly altered form in McSweeney’s #17 (2005); “The Doctor,” which is chapter two of book 2 appeared in slightly altered form in the October 2004 issue of New Review of Literature; chapter eight of book 2 about Quetico appeared in slightly altered form in the Chicago Tribune on June 23, 1985.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Ferry, Peter.

  Travel writing/Peter Ferry.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. High school teachers—Fiction. 2. Travel writers—Fiction. 3. Storytelling—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.E777T73 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2007036576

  ISBN 978-0-15-101436-1

  ISBN 978-0-15-603392-3 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-547-54595-0

  v2.1017

  While some characters in Travel Writing are real people, the book is a work of fiction. The characters’ words, actions, and motivations are fictitious.

  For Lisa Kim,

  Charlie Duke, and

  Carolyn O’Connor Ferry

  The men on the river were fishing. (Untrue; but then, so is most information.)

  —E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

  Book One

  …

  Some Time Ago, with Contemporary Interludes

  1

  …

  Telling Stories

  SOMETIMES I TRY to show my students the power of the story by telling them one. I say, “Last night I was driving home from work and—now, I’m just making this up off the top of my head—I noticed in my rearview mirror that there was a car swerving in and out of my lane. Anyway, I was on that stretch of Sheridan Road just south of Kenilworth that’s two lanes each way and no divider and no shoulder and no margin for error, in other words, so I slowed down to let the car pass, or would have slowed down to let it pass me if this had really happened, which it didn’t, and as it went by I had a look—a quick look—at the driver and I saw three things. First, that it was a woman and that she was very exotic and quite beautiful. Second, I noticed—or would have noticed if I weren’t making this up—that there was something wrong with her; her head was bobbing as if she were drunk or sick or fighting sleep. Now, the third thing I noticed was that her shoulders were bare, and I had the strange sensation that more was bare—that her breasts were exposed or perhaps she was completely nude. Now, remember I’m just making this up. Anyway, I followed her for some time watching her weave and bounce off the curb, wondering what I should do, wishing I had a cell phone, although unsure who I would or should call, when we came to a red light and I found myself drawing up beside her.”

  By this point, a girl whose hair is green today and who has been passing notes is listening to me, and a dog-faced boy who has surreptitiously been doing his Spanish homework has stopped and a kid whose head was down on his arm—call him Nick—has sat up. When I have eye contact with each member of the class, I stop. I say, “But of course none of this ever really happened, and I’ve told you that four times, and you know it didn’t happen. But look at you. You’re interested, you want to know the rest, you want to know if she was naked and what was wrong with her and what I did or didn’t do and all the rest, even though I’m making it all up right in front of you, and that is why stories are so powerful.”

  So, I’m a teacher, a high school teacher. In our society that gives me very little authority. About the highest compliment most people can pay a teacher is to ask why he or she became a teacher. That’s supposed to be flattering, as in “You could have really done something important with your life.” To boost my stock, I guess, I also do some writing, especially travel pieces for newspapers, magazines, and travel guides.

  I teach English at the public high school in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, which in an odd way gives me even less authority than if I taught in a blue-collar neighborhood or a farm town where I would at least have more education than the parents of most of my students. In Lake Forest teachers are sometimes treated like the lawn service. “Honey, see if you have time to call the caterers about Saturday, and let’s get someone out here to fix that toilet and someone to teach Charlie the difference between active and passive voice.” Mind plumbers. But that’s okay. It’s a lovely place to teach, and we’re paid a living wage. Besides, I like working with people who bring their own lunches and drive little cars. Most teachers are pretty good people.

  Before teaching I worked for a publishing house. I sat in a windowless cubicle writing textbooks for which someone else made a lot of money; it isn’t glamorous, but you can get rich if you can get every eighth grader in the state of Texas to read or at least buy your thirty-dollar book. And somehow people think that it is glamorous. I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women—and that was important to me then—would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.

  Once I repeated that anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.

  But it really did happen, of course, the girl in the car, or could have or might as well have happened. It happened just as surely as Ernest Hemingway went down to Pamplona with a bunch of people one of whom was not Lady Brett Ashley, but was Lady Duff Twysden, and she really did sleep with everyone under the sun so that years later when she died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-five in Taxco, Mexico, all of her pallbearers were former lovers, and they really did drop her casket coming down the steps of the cathedral, and those people all drank way too much and slept with each other or tried to and couldn’t, so that one morning drinking coffee in the Café Iruña or six months later in Paris, Hemingway said “what if” and “suppose . . .” It happened just as surely as Stephen Crane was shipwrecked off the coast of Florida
in 1896 and spent four days in a lifeboat and then wrote one of the best American short stories ever about it. But it hadn’t happened the night before, and, of course, the woman wasn’t naked; I just put that in for purposes of teenage titillation. No, it was some time ago now on a Friday evening in December a week or two before winter break. I had stayed around to clear my desk, so it was after six when I was driving home for the weekend, tired and happy. And she really was swerving crazily and bouncing off curbs. I did get behind her, and as she went by I had just a glimpse of her and saw that she was quite beautiful, although I must tell you that I have a thing about falling in love with women I see through glass. Once I had a fantasy that lasted some months about a drive-in bank teller with a sexy voice. I finally had to see who she was, so I went into the bank. From a distance I spotted her at the drive-in window with her back to me, and I was thrilled, but when she turned around I saw that she was horse faced and middle-aged. I went back to my car disappointed and wondering what I had fallen in love with and if I was still in love with it. So, anyway, I followed Lisa Kim, for that was her name, down Sheridan Road on this dark winter evening, which wasn’t very hard because her right rear taillight cover was broken and the light shone white. I followed her, becoming increasingly fascinated and concerned at the same time. How had she gotten so drunk so early? Had she been to an office party? And what could I possibly do about this situation? I looked for a cop, or rather hoped one would see her because by the time I’d have told the story, she’d have been gone, lost in the traffic. Could I signal to her? Should I pull up beside her and have another look? But there was no doubt she was in trouble, and besides, she might swerve into my lane and drive me into oncoming traffic. And why was I so concerned? Would I have been if she had been a woman on a cell phone in an SUV? A black guy with his cap on sideways? An old man? Then there was the stoplight when I did pull up beside her, the one at Sheridan Road and Lake Street, the one just before the