Orlando began our spate of many Greyhound bus trips, and this one kicked off in style. Our driver Len, an African-American who took obvious pride in his uniform, announced in a friendly, southern, down-home accent that alcohol was banned on the bus, “so if you wann’ have a some’a the drink you’d best get your nip back home…” utterly charming.
I sat next to a Cuban woman from Florida and practiced my Spanish on her (in doing so, realising that it had developed premature rust spots), and eventually was sat next to by Marie, a Haitian woman who’d emigrated in the 1970s. She’d been visiting her pregnant daughter in Miami, and was heading back home to Jersey (“I hate it there – I wanna get back to Long Island as soon as I can”). She was sixty, and of a vintage who make a habit of carrying full-sized photographs of their children and children-in-law. She waxed lyrical about her two daughters, and lamented her son’s failings and constant requests for money. With the crossing of the Florida border came a new boldness in my questioning; fuelled, perhaps, by my sudden reintroduction into the art of making conversation in my native tongue. I asked Marie about Haiti; what she fled and why, the circumstances in which she came to the US, and what the situation is like in her home country (she had returned six months previously). “Terrible,” came the reply, “…but you know that.”
I did.
The damage, she said, was exactly as one would expect of a conflagration of such circumstances, with the continuing threat of disease being the chief concern. Instead of focusing on this, however, she seemed to want to dwell on the beauty and vibrancy of Haiti – an outlook all but lost in the wake of the earthquake, she sighed.
So, would she go back?
“No.”
Beauty and dynamism are one thing, but “I’m old, and I gotta be safe, or at least feel like I am.”
It was this conversation I had been waiting for, even as days ago I had stared helplessly into South American eyes as they attempted to tell me something that necessitated language far beyond my grasp of Spanish. I had thought of these people as untapped oil wells, whose wealth of stories and insights would be forever beyond my grasp. With Marie, however, I had found a way to extract the many thoughts she had.
Upon arrival at Brunswick, Tom and I heard our first heavy Georgia accent at the service station, and, again, were excited to learn that “they actually talk like that!” We were picked up in a rickety van and taken out of town and into the surrounding woods, where our accommodation for the next three days lay: the Hostel in the Forest. The trees there are tall and skinny, with leaves distributed sporadically along the trunk, closely resembling those found in films about creepy Georgian forest occurrences in the oeuvre of the Blair Witch Project. Dappled light filters through with little effort – perhaps adopting a greenish tinge on its way down to the forest floor, whereupon it illuminates the leaf litter.
The Lake
View from the pool at sunset
There are about a dozen people living here, in treehouses or cabins, and all share a sense of community that leaves you smiling after dinner, which everyone contributes to – whether it be cooking, cleaning or setting up. There was a clothing-optional lake onsite, along with the composting toilets and an extensive book and instrument collection (I was particularly excited to play the guitar again after noticing my callouses were fading).
Me. Elegant.
What a sense of “ahhhh” I felt at that place: after many weeks of being in and around civilisations and their buildings and cities, to be able to remove myself from it altogether was a confronting relief, and one I was thankful for, along with the abundance of green natural surrounds (the desert of Peru had made any foliage stand out on my corneas). Being surrounded by fireflies on the walk back through the forest along the dark path from a late-night game of pool in the common room was undoubtedly one of the most serenely wonderful experiences of the United States for me.
With nothing but yourself and the land around you, the haze seems to clear a little, and I was glad of the opportunity to have my travelling perspective adjusted yet again in this strange, wonderful place, with strange, wonderful people.
climbingatree 