Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath
– we do not recreate. Recreating is an all-American invention. Americans are compelled to possess their leisure as they are compelled to possess most anything, and to be fully the owner of their leisure, they must accumulate experience. This is why the American recreator will happily schedule in a dozen European capitals in a week, but still won’t hang around in the Sistine Chapel if the paper in the toilets runs out. For the American recreator it is the quantity of experience that matters, not its quality.
After two hours on the road I pull into a rest area, find a spot under a mesquite tree and doze a while with the air conditioning high. I wake up to a woman knocking on the window for two quarters to put in the soda machine. Quite a crowd has gathered in the parking lot, a line of RVs competes for space directly in front of the restrooms, map and vending machines. The woman returns, wanting to introduce me to her dogs. Jeez, dog-lovers.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘this place is full of Mexicans and Indians. Mexicans and Indians. Folks like us are outnumbered. At least it feels that way.’ We finish the soda in the ‘65 Scottie trailer she bought six months ago with the redundancy payoff from a marketing job in Pennsylvania. ‘Came out here, followed the myth,’ she says, ‘and I liked it.’ She doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she settles down somewhere and builds another life.
‘This dog here’s too old to be on the road,’ she says, ‘he needs a place where he can feel comfortable enough to go ahead and die.’
Pinned up in the Scottie is a portrait of Ross Perot taken during his presidential campaign, still looking like a VE-Day vet after all these years.
The rest area feels as though an RV convention pulled in; RVs piled high inside with kids and bulk-buy Kool Aid alongside modest little trailers with chromium trim and lines of rivets, looking like some by-product of rocket science. A couple descend from an ancient Winnebago with Illinois plates and sit under the shade of a cottonwood sucking Diet Cokes in silent contemplation.
Homelessness is a profound anxiety in the American psyche, a cyst buried in the deeper, more feral places of the mind. At the wheel of an RV you can travel a thousand miles and never leave home; there it is in miniature, rolling along behind. For American recreators the RV acts as a kind of mediator between the fear of homelessness and the fascination with freedom. Think of that couple eating up the miles in their mechanical homestead, raw with anticipation, drinking in the road, surveying with pride the empire unfolding before them – their empire. And think of that couple sitting watching TV or flipping cards or making out in a desert trailer park at the side of an indistinct highway on a blackened plain, pulled up alongside a line of other RVs bigger and newer and more expensive than their own.
‘Beneath him with new wonder now he views
To all delight of human sense exposed In narrow room nature’s whole wealth, yeah more, A heav’n on earth …’
JOHN MILTON
The road north up through Tucson towards Oracle is known as the Magic Mile, although quite why it’s difficult to say. The kind of stores and services littered along it suggest a highway favoured only by truck drivers en route to somewhere else. Just where the mile begins there is a series of blacked-out bars with billboards made up of women’s torsos, announcing ‘24-hour show girls’. From the slow lane on the Interstate all you can see of the Magic Mile is a row of gargantuan cardboard legs in spike heels and garter belts the colour of cotton candy.
It’s a busy road, though, not because it runs up to Oracle, which is a sclerotic little nowhere of a place, but because a few miles beyond that town lies an oracle of another kind, as much of a draw to apostates and New Age types as Lourdes is to Catholics.
What drew me to this oracle was a set of circumstances sufficiently strange to warrant explanation. It began quite by accident in western Belize some years ago, in a ramshackle town called San Ignacio, near the border with Guatemala. I had become entangled in a brief and unhappy love affair from which I made a cowardly escape very early one morning by stealing away and boarding a bus heading to Dangriga, a swamp town on the Caribbean coast. There I found a boarding house and resolved to lie low. Creosote tar sweated from the stilted shacks gathered around the little harbour and the air was so sullen that it was difficult not to be lowered by it. At night liverish land crabs scuttled from their holes and took over the streets, like an army of dismembered hands. Every structure in Dangriga not actually made from mud was covered in it. A few lugubrious rastafarians hung about what passed for the centre of the town, which was separated from the swamp all around by a blue fug of burning weed. Dangriga’s only source of income, so far as I could make out, came from bussing snapper, lobster and the occasional barracuda to the inland capital. The men who could afford a dugout or a one-man, flat-keeled dory would put out at night and bring in their catch early the next morning. Those who had no boats became assistants to the others, or rastafarians – or both. The women would pass their mornings gutting and drying whatever fish were surplus to the day’s requirements on long lines of twine, hung over the doorways of the shacks and serving, incidentally, as mosquito nets. By two in the afternoon, everyone was asleep. There would be no-one left to talk to, nothing much to do but roll up a reefer, tune the radio to the station that played ska and marimba and settle down to watch the pale brown sea. I spent many days of distant, peaceless reverie like this.
Absolutely nothing that was not already on show had ever happened in Dangriga. No wars, no revolutions, no great passions of any sort. Dangriga’s history was without secrets.
According to my map a huge uninhabited atoll group called Turneffe lay directly out to sea from Dangriga. I would often sit wall-eyed in front of that brown bay and imagine Turneffe in the distance as a lush, mudless Eden. Without the listless daydream of Turneffe I like to think that I should have gone mad in Dangriga. I should not have done so, but I like to think it all the same.
About four years later I met the man who owned Turneffe, or at least, a little part of it. At least, he managed a little part of it for someone else. His name was Ray Lightburn, and he had some environmental project going, he said. Ray was what is commonly known as a charismatic – huge, commanding, almost insanely driven. He’d been a prominent trade unionist in Britain in the sixties, and he possessed a store-cupboard of anecdotes about political heavyweights he had known and met. Whether they were true or not didn’t seem to matter. Like many charismatics, who are after all expected to be emblematic rather than real, Ray was his own parody. Obviously, he liked it that way. In any case, back in Belize he’d made his political ambitions evident by sinking himself into the environmental movement and conspicuously raising the cash from a Texan oil billionaire with ecological leanings to buy up part of Blackbird Caye in the Turneffe cluster. Blackbird Caye was to all intents and purposes uninhabited at that time; a hippy with too much leisure on his hands had set up a little diving school on one side of the island, but it was Ray who got the money together to transform the Caye into what he envisioned would be an eco-tourists’ paradise. As he saw it, the islands’ future rested in tourism of one sort or another, and the only means to prevent them from becoming sites for honeymoon hotels and Clubs Méditerranées was to preselect the market. Ray was a prophet of the inevitable. The idea that the islands might be purchased to be left pristine evidently had not occurred to him, or if it had, he had dismissed it out of hand. Ray had a name to make. The Texan billionaire, Ed Bass, was perhaps his means to this end.
There was a large dolphin population down at Turneffe, which (until Ray stepped in) had enjoyed almost no contact with human beings. Ray’s idea was to hire a scientist who would take out crews of paying guests on ‘scientific’ expeditions to mark and tag these creatures. Ray didn’t really seem to know the details. ‘What species of dolphin?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I leave those things to the scientists. This is a great project. I believe in it.’
The scientist, a singular marine biology student, had accepted the post of tour guide cum researcher in order to complete her Ph.D. In exchange for accommodation and the use of a research boat the student would drag along on her expeditions a pack of dew-eyed