From the Mouth of a Shark

 

“An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at asking to be let in.” 

When I read The Jewel in the Crown quartet by Paul Scott, I was struck by this passage. It’s spoken by the character of Dimitri Bronowsky, the elderly White Russian émigré who had spent much of his life in India having fled Russia after the Revolution.

It reminded me of a conversation I had many years ago with a Hungarian colleague who had to leave his country after the uprising of 1956 and settled in the UK. When we talked, glasnost was just beginning and he’d finally been able to go back. He told me about smelling the acacia trees and seeing geese crossing the road and getting a powerful sense of home.

Home. It’s an evocative word, somewhat over-freighted with meaning. I’m an emigrant myself so I know how easy it is romanticize the place you left behind. Pictures of the South Downs or the Scottish coastline or a certain bend in the river Thames can bring actual tears to my eyes.

But I am an exile by choice, not circumstance. I can go “home” any time I want for the cost of a plane fare. I left to broaden my horizons, not because of economic deprivation, starvation, prison, torture, or fear of death, which is what the vast majority of people arriving in Europe from Syria and other unstable countries were facing. In the powerful video that spearheads the fundraising drive called “Help is Coming,” the actor Benedict Cumberbatch quotes from a powerful poem by Warsan Shire called Home. It begins: “No-one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”  

They left to save their lives and to try to give their children the kind of future that most of us who live in prosperous Western countries take for granted. It is to be hoped that, like the 19^th century emigrants arriving at Ellis Island and the displaced European refugees at the end of World War II, they will find peaceful places to settle where their children can grow and thrive and contribute to their new communities. Yet they will always be haunted by the sights, smells, and sounds of their native lands, which they may never have the chance to see, smell and hear again.   

Click here to donate to a remarkable campaign by a coalition of writers led by the children’s author Patrick Ness to raise funds for Save the Children’s efforts to help and settle Syrian refugees.

From Sea to Shining Sea

Breaking like the Waves at Malibu - Cover of "For the Roses" Joni Mitchell

This spring, I, who normally live most of my waking hours within the four walls of my home office in suburbia, suddenly found myself flung across oceans and prairies to places both new and familiar.

In March I found myself among the boho Pacific beaches and the freeways of the San Diego area. The southern California of my imagination was constructed of piecemeal images from my youthful cultural experiences – David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, and Joni Mitchell singing “Breaking like the waves at Malibu” and “Oh make me feel good rock and roll band, I’m your biggest fan, California, I’m coming home.”  

In reality, SoCal was all those things and more – rows of twisted palms like Dr. Suess’s truffula trees in The Lorax, colonies of sealions draped over the rocks at La Jolla, the fire baskets on the beach outside the Hotel del Coronado where Billy Wilder shot the exterior scenes of Some Like it Hot in 1959. Tijuana, Mexico just beyond the San Ysidro mountains. A barefoot aging hippy, brown as a nut, doing wheelies on his bike on the boardwalk at Pacific Beach amid the windchimes and skateboarders.  

Pacific Beach, California

 

Just six weeks later, I was standing 5,150 miles away in a pouring, blowing rain beside a very different sea in the Scottish town where I grew up. Here were familiar rock formations, unchanged for hundreds of years, the outcrops pushing out into the North Sea. Gulls surfing on the ever-present wind or perched on chimney-tops, screeching. In those few short weeks, I’d gone from from huevos rancheros to smoked haddock for breakfast, from tequila to scotch, and from dazzling blue skies to persistent grey and chilly rain that, surprisingly at the end of the day, relented and broke out into watery evening sunshine. 

Billowness Beach, Anstruther, Fife, Scotland

The writer Christopher Rush who grew up on the shores of East Fife and still lives there described the beaches of that coast in his lyrical memoir, Hellfire and Herring:

Down on the shore in the quieter weather the tide was creeping up the dry stones of the beach. The water, which had been wintrily muddy in the evenings, in the mornings became as clear as glass all along the coast, and scum could be seen now floating on the flood tide. Then the first green water of the year appeared whenever there was a fresh wind blowing from the north-west. The sea turned a living blue, with further out the long lanes of deep emerald green that could never be seen in winter. In the shrimp-filled rock pools, where the baby porcelain crabs scuttled like loose thumb-nails, the green sleet started to grow and the whelks to gather in large numbers, wet black ruby clusters.

Even the seaweed in California looked different and was on a larger scale. 

For me, it was a spring full of changing perspectives, of different ways of seeing the world. It showed me how much a writer needs to be rooted in one place on the planet, to know the feel of every stone under her hand, but also to cast her net outwards and never stop traveling to brand new places, giving the imagination the chance to roam ever wider while never losing sight of where it began. 

History in Flight

When I first came to Washington D.C. many years ago, I was a political junkie and was thrilled by my physical proximity to the men and women whose faces were on television and the front pages of the newspapers every day. (This was in the dark ages before the Internet.) I lived just eight blocks from the Capitol and would routinely see famous faces on my walks down to the Mall - Senator Ted Kennedy surrounded by staffers, Bob Schieffer of CBS News who gave me the loveliest of avuncular smiles one day as our paths crossed on the Senate grounds.   

In those days you could wander around Congress with minimal security. I was able to take my dad to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting to see J.K. Galbraith, the renowned economist, testifying, and remember seeing Senator John Kerry’s long face open into a tremendous yawn. When I worked downtown, I would often encounter traffic being held up for motorcades for such luminaries as Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, or Yitzhak Rabin, though tinted windows hid them from view. But one day as I walked down 17^th Street, Bill Clinton’s motorcade went speeding by, and I got a clear view of POTUS in solitary state in the back of his limo, his glasses on, head bent over some papers.

These days I live less than an hour outside the city, but I hardly ever go downtown. I work from my little house in a pleasant Maryland suburb, and have access to great restaurants, live theater, movie theaters, and great friends our here in the ’burbs. Over the years, political Washington has become as foreign to me as when I first arrived in this country.

But every year at the end of March or the beginning of April, I reacquaint myself with the Nation’s Capital when I make my annual cherry blossom walk around the Tidal Basin. Washington’s blooming cherry blossom trees are one of the wonders of the world, and I have been privileged to enjoy their glory every year but one since 1988. The Japanese cherry trees (Yoshino and Kanzan) were a gift to the city of Washington in 1912 from the Mayor of Tokyo City to enhance the growing friendship between Japan and the U.S. - back in those innocent days 30 years before Pearl Harbor. 

The blossoms were late this year, and so was I. I had so much work to do I couldn’t get downtown until after the period of “peak bloom” when the blossoms are at their most spectacular. On the day I was there, rain had knocked many of the petals off the delicate blooms, but there was still much beauty to be seen – showers of drifting petals falling from the trees, pink swirls in the water of the Tidal Basin, carpets of petals that looked like the real snow that had covered the same ground only three weeks before.  

As I was sitting on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial amid a swarm of other blossom watchers, the President’s helicopter, Marine One, flew in over the Tidal Basin from the east. Its two identical flanking helicopters peeled away, and Marine One headed into the distance and descended out of sight onto the South Lawn of The White House. Seeing that helicopter made me think of Jack Kennedy’s children running to greet him as he descended the helicopter’s steps, little John Kennedy Junior thrilled to be allowed to sit at the controls, Ronald Reagan coming down the steps in his Western gear from the California White House, and – most indelibly – Richard Nixon leaving The White House after his resignation, his hands thrust out in defiant V signs.  

After about ten minutes, I saw Marine One rise again from the South Lawn. It curved over the Tidal Basin as if saluting the blossoms, its faithful wingmen once again on either side. As I shaded my eyes to look up, it passed almost directly above me, carrying a man whose face is known around the globe, whose decisions affect millions of people, who is probably the most powerful person in the world. And suddenly, after many years, I felt the thrill of my proximity to history all over again. 

(My satirical short story on the subject of a young woman's encounter with a famous face was published last year in an anthology of writing about Washington D.C.)