Words, Galaxies, and Stars
Back to Rock Island
"The general unraveling of things was called a 'connectivity crisis.' But the transmission of words had ceased, so no one called it that. Eventually, the words made of bits that had morphed into memes and that had lost all meaning dissipated like the fading ink on seventeenth century documents, empty memory, neither stored nor retrievable. I heard someone say on the TV in the last days of broadcasting. 'There are no words to express how we feel.' And without words, there was no memory and no way forward."
James Vantana Back to Rock Island
Below are pieces of chapters from James Vantana's forthcoming novel, Back to Rock Island. They are offered in no particular order and are culled from throughout the book.
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BACK TO ROCK ISLAND I
It reached this point when I was compelled to ask what happened and why, not just to me, or especially, Elaine, but the world, which fell apart around us and in us.
The ferry docked. The passengers, having crossed the river to the other side, this shore where birds still lived, disembarked and headed somewhere through the shadows of tall buildings. The wind, which had blown furiously earlier, was calm, and these former passengers, who had made it across, lifted their faces to the warm, late afternoon summer sun. Some of them turned and smiled at each other. No one carried or stared at a screen. A lot had changed.
I stood next to over a hundred seagulls, perched in a long line along the dock’s railing. They stared knowingly at the people who were disappearing into the shadowy city. Birds experience events before people do, have an almost supernatural foresight, taking flight before the bridge collapses, the buildings explode, the guns go off, or the bombs burst. The empty gaze and unruffled stance of these gulls told me that whatever they knew it did not bother them. For them, the alarm had sounded long ago, and again and again, and now they neither rested nor waited and did not fly away since they had made it safely here and now, when the foreboding was all gone. Birds have hindsight, memory, too, as if they knew what happened and why, and I was determined to find out.
I boarded the boat to start my way back, back, back with the tidal waters in the hazy orange sun, dancing silver cream, curdling along an ancient shore where two people shared their secrets a long time ago…
The Story of William Van Arsdale and Ingrid Marie Elstar
As discovered in the papers of Theo Gotshall, a bookkeeper who lived on the outskirts of Albany in the 1700s, which were discovered early in the twenty-first century in the basement ruins of a Chipotle restaurant in a suburban strip mall, razed after a mass shooting that left thirty-one dead, including eight children.
Summary
William Van Arsdale worked side-by-side with Ingrid Marie Elstar on a farm established by Josiah Newkirk in the village of Bergen, established by the Dutch in 1660 as part of the New Netherlands colony. It lay across the river from New Amsterdam, later New York City. Van Arsdale had come from Holland in 1679 under an indentured servant agreement with Newkirk. Elstar was a Lenape woman forced into servitude by the village elders after she was convicted of loitering in old Bergen Square and exiled by her Native community. It was also widely rumored that her father was an escaped enslaved African. The Newkirks were kind to her and paid her a fair wage as well as room and board. After a time, she was also hired as a cook at the Dutch Academy, roasting maize for the white children.
As the history unfolded, Van Arsdale and Elstar fell deeply in love and sought to marry. The elders of the Dutch Reformed Church did not approve of the proposed marriage and refused to sanction the union or allow the couple to live in wedlock within the Village of Bergen. But Van Arsdale and Elstar had many friends in the African community, composed mostly of enslaved people forced to work in building and farming in Bergen and who had established their own church and community in the swampy marshlands, adjacent to the old Indian village of Communipaw, on the southeastern shores of the Palisades, along the North River at the place where Henry Hudson first coveted the land and its riches.
The African church and burial ground were near where Jan Evertsen Bout had built a house on land he had purchased from Michael Reyniersz Pauw. The Bout House, as it was known, was abandoned by its owner and became an inn where hard cider and rum were served to a clientele of less than stellar reputation. It was said that gambling and prostitution were common practices at the old Bout House. It was a place where no one of good standing from Bergen would ever go.
Van Arsdale and Elstar were married at the African church, and Van Arsdale, who had finished his period of indentured servitude, was offered a small parcel of land in the south of Bergen, outside of the stockade village. Van Arsdale had to travel to Albany in early October 1689 (as known from the colonial records) to secure the deed for the property, and his young wife waited impatiently for his return. After three weeks, Van Arsdale returned early one morning, joyous with deed in hand and stopped at the Academy, where Ingrid Marie should have been preparing breakfast, in the hopes of finding his wife. She wasn’t there. Frantic, he went from door to door, asking for her. There were rumors that she was last seen in Bergen Square talking with some Dutch West India traders, who had wandered up from Communipaw in search of pleasure. He received the horrible news about the riotous British soldiers who had rampaged through Bergen and the disappearance of Ingrid Marie. He mounted his horse and took off down the old Communipaw road in search of his beloved. As far as anyone thus far knows, neither Ingrid Marie Elstar nor William Van Arsdale were ever heard from again.
BACK TO ROCK ISLAND II
The ferry ride, a few trains, and a long walk later, I stood on top of Rose Hill. Though I had been back a million times in my mind and in my dreams, it had been a long time since I had been back to where this all started, where something had fixed in me a certain way that has led here. I had not seen Elaine in years. The last I saw of her was in an Instagram post just before the Internet collapsed. I had saved it and watched it over and over, hoping to discern something about what had befallen her. I can remember the images, now only in my head:
She was squatting in what looked like a vast field of yellow daffodils. One by one, she picked the flowers off and threw them in the air where they rose against a bright blue sky, seemed to hover for an instant, and then fell to the earth. She lifted her head and watched the beautiful, doomed flowers dance against an endless sky, vibrant yellow on deep, saturated blue. Her long brown hair, tangled and streaked with gray, hid her eyes.
A dark orange sun hung low in the gray haze that was the sky. The ground was littered with bits of plastic and metal, rare earth concoctions for which millions had given their lives and with which many millions more had given theirs away, fragments of the gadgets and gun stuff that earth’s once most dominant species had gotten all wrong in its effort to be happy and safe. I stepped on it and through it until I got a view down the hill, past the houses where maybe things started to go wrong a long time ago…
I was captivated by the teenagers. They did cool things like fix bicycles, take drugs, fuck, get pregnant, then not pregnant, blast rock and roll, and drive fast cars in a circle in the cul-de-sac. All memorable, but none of it worth emulating. Their parents got drunk, smoked cigarettes, abused their spouses, fucked their neighbors’ wives, bought new cars every year, worked in the “city,” and worked really hard at curating perfect, green lawns. It was an all-white world, a rich world by any measure, and an empty, meaningless void where people went to church on Sunday and looked at other people (or hid from them) because the consumer gods demanded a certain look. And if these people had faith in anything, it was in the things they could buy and then display to the envious, never-sated public. These were people in need of distraction - all the time. At church on Sundays, the young women and men, dressed stylishly and even provocatively, became fantasies for bored spouses, who had to think of someone else for gratification.
And then there were their cars, which were more important than anyone or anything else. They meant freedom to the teenagers, some of whom died in automobile tangled steel and fire. They meant status to the adults, who spent lavishly on them and attended to them more than they attended to their children or themselves. They kept them filled with the earth's blood, and they drove them drunk, sometimes killing themselves and other people. The cars conveyed the people, who had largely stopped walking and who had grown fat, through the suburban maze of places where they gave their money. Later, before it all went wrong, they could give away their money on their phones, but often they still did this while driving to places they mistakenly believed they needed to be.
They had lived in the old, colorless houses, mostly shuttered now, that I walked past on my way to the bottom of the hill, the cul-de-sac now without cars, or kids, or teenagers...All faded away into the haze of their smoky, deluded desires, the pall of burnt stuff, reclaimed by the earth, from which it had all been mined and stripped by a doomed species. It was all gone now except for the worn path leading farther down Rose Hill, beyond the cracked pavement and abandoned houses, and down to Rock Island. The entrance to the path had once been a closely held secret, among my friends, and among the lush, green thickets that once carpeted the woods that were cut down long ago to make room for more houses that all looked the same. Now it was just the worn, dry dirt, and the scattered pieces of the gadgeted world. When we were little, we had to find our way anew each spring as the path disappeared beneath a web of vigorous branches and thick, pale spring-green leaves. Now, except for some barren stumps and dead wood, the way to Rock Island was plain and bereft of the mystery that fueled our sense of wonder. As I started down to where the magic had first blossomed, I passed dead dreams, smelled the faint, dry rot, and thought about what happened…
In a winter long ago, the snow had fallen thick and heavy. Then an ice storm created a glazed surface on the snowpack that we could walk on because we were little and didn’t weigh too much. At the end of February, the higher sun melted the ice and snow, and the grass, soon to be curated again, smelled wet and fresh and new. Down at Rock Island, the skunk cabbage shoots emerged first, yellow green stabbing out through the wet soil. Beneath the glints of sun that bounced off the icy water, quick sunfish began to assemble pebble nests in the shadows made by a blizzard of pink and white blossom petals gliding on the water’s surface. Newborn tadpoles scurried in circles and later sprouted legs. In that place of smooth rocks, clear water, filtered sunlight, and new brilliant green, we pantomimed through the early mysteries of spring - longing without object then, at least nothing clearly discernible and certainly not attainable. But it became an elaborate dance, a flowering embroidered in make believe.
The stream that fed Rock Island flowed on into a deep, murky pond, surrounded by woods of oak, maple, pine - old trees that seem to know where they stood. Within this forest, which we called “the woods,” a few hundred feet up a rise from the water, there was a small clearing, an open space where the sunlight met the ground padded with fallen needles and leaves. A large, flat-topped rock sat in the center, surrounded by smaller ones in an arrangement scattered by time. In first grade, we used the rock as a wedding throne. I never sat on it with her; the other boys did that. I played the role of an attending squire, bearing gifts for imagined newlyweds. I and the woods and the sound of flowing water and a thousand bird choir orchestrated the weddings where schoolgirl and schoolboy crushes were ritualistically consummated in the mid-spring air. I stood off to the side as the other kids flirted awkwardly, feigned romance, and proclaimed undying love.
On the day of Becky and David’s wedding, a boisterous flock of starlings chatted urgently in the upper branches of a giant mulberry tree. Then they went suddenly silent as Becky and David entered the clearing, she with a messy garland of wildflowers, hastily arranged by the other girls, like a crown atop her blonde hair. I don’t remember too well what David looked like, but her image has stayed with me forever. I wasn’t jealous (I don’t know what that would be). I was just alone watching while the other kids laughed and played and played at love. The wedding throne rock was big and not easy for a small girl to climb onto and stand. Becky tried, but I saw something in her dark eyes - a distant, bottomless sorrow - just for an instant before she fell off the rock and to the ground, her head meeting one of the smaller rocks, - not hitting it hard but almost like landing on it as if it were a pillow that waited for her.
Becky was okay, just dazed and frightened as the other kids helped her out of the clearing, the woods, and away from Rock Island and toward the veneer of parental care and back into the world of suburban houses, curated lawns, cars, and broken people covering their mess with money. Left by myself in the clearing, I saw one of the flowers - yellow and tattered and perfect - from the bridal garland lying on the small flat rock that had welcomed Becky’s head. Picking up the flower and spellbound by its beauty, I noticed some marks on the rock’s surface. At first, they just looked like random scratches, but, looking closer, I discerned a sun, a moon, stars, and “W & E 1687.” Curious but still feeling apart from the others’ (not my) love story, like an interloper in someone or somewhere else’s history land, I placed the flower gently on the ground and covered it with the small rock, the inscription facing down atop the yellow flower.
In time, the world smothered and ruined the magic of Rock Island. The make-believe newlyweds of the flat-top rock gradually embraced rituals without imagination as they grew terrified of mystery and sought the reassurance and comfort of the material, of the bought, owned, and sold. Becky and David, forgetting what they felt in the woods long ago, did everything they could to become like everyone else. As a teenager, more and more exiled from a world that made no sense to me, I watched as the land around Rock Island, including the woods and pond, was bought by the just landed Heseltines, who put up “No Trespassing” signs and cut down most of the woods, imitating the colonizers of long ago. They spread weed killer, like a virus, all around the pond, killing most of the frogs and their tadpoles, as well as the fish. They built a large house where a field of tall grasses and dancing clover saturated with butterflies once thrived and constructed a multi-tiered deck where Mrs. Greta Heseltine, in a tiny floral print bikini, sunbathed, hoping to attract a man who never came and only providing fantasies for teenage boys’ self-pleasure. Meanwhile, Mr. Herb Heseltine, rarely home with his wife and daughters, frolicked around the West Village in women’s clothing and let himself be fucked in the ass by countless men late at night on the west side, abandoned piers of lower Manhattan. The Heseltine’s had two daughters who were given a new bicycle each year, which they rode around and around in the cul de sac, in soothing circles to escape the chaotic confusion of their parents slapped together lives. Rather than fix their mess, the Heseltines set about razing all that was good about Rose Hill and covering the cut, chopped, and paved landscape with artifice sturdy enough to conceal their stink. It never could. Instead, they and others, took more and more from the earth and reconfigured into more and more stuff – cars, gadgets, devices, houses, malls, guns – a chronic, futile attempt to cover up the anxiety and pain of their endlessly smoldering misunderstood needs until they were forgotten.
BACK TO ROCK ISLAND III
Hillside College - Sometime in the mid-2000s
It was a midsummer morning. The world was at that midpoint, that tipping point between green and orange, between possibility and death, between starting and finishing. I sat at my desk and stared out through the open window, fixated on the giant mulberry tree where a million starlings seemed to scream.
I found myself in the twenty-first century, and, without account, still alive. That was all I had to go on. But given where I (we) had been, it made sense to explore that - to try to unpack those histories that led to here. I had travelled. I had read. I did a Ph.D. Along the way, I became interested in the story of William Van Arsdale and Ingrid Marie Elstar, when, as a grad student, I was asked to write a chapter for a colonial history booklet on Communipaw, an early Dutch settlement on the western shore of the Hudson River, across from the bustling trading post of New Amsterdam. Their two lives, in a way, attached to mine, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I spent the balance of the 1990s travelling more and reading more and teaching here and there. I ended up at Hillside, sharing the history I was learning…
William Van Arsdale and Ingrid Marie Elstar. I was drawn to their story in part because the original European settlers of Rose Hill disembarked from their ships at Communipaw. In the mid and late-1600s, it was a riotous place, with a tavern and inn where rum-soaked Europeans, Native Americans, Africans, and others from the global regions of the vast Dutch trade empire, cavorted and mixed. This was all somehow familiar: the hybrid cultures that engrossed and enchanted me in the Caribbean basin to where I often travelled and felt at home. The places where difference – beautiful, meaningful difference – abounds, cultivated in a terrible, painful colonial history, a forced mixing and mingling, painfully birthing the exquisite wonder of post-colonial worlds ruminated here.
In this setting, William and Elstar found each other and knew and lost love. Their story, culled from found fragments, became like all the knowledge I accumulated and which I felt compelled to share with my students and just to share, too.
Colonial records revealed little about William and Elstar, so I filled in the details. I had “The Story of Elstar and William Van Arsdale” document, which had been published in the Albany Gazette after they had been found amongst the rubble of “Chipotle 16” - the name given because it was the sixteenth gun massacre to mar that chain during the unraveling. From that, I scoured various extant legal documents and found the following sources:
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A Dutch colonial court record stating that Ingrid Marie Elstar was sentenced to a flogging and public stockade for fornication and adultery.
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A ship’s manifest listing an “Elstar” as the property of Otto Bruns, the captain of a ship who sailed from New Amsterdam for Barbados on June 20, 1691.
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A deed transfer dated June 21, 1692, and showing the sale of a small plot of land by William Van Arsdale to a “Johann Bruns.”
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A list of missing persons after the great earthquake of 1692 in the English colony of Port Royal, Jamaica with no mention of Bruns or Elstar.
This wasn’t too much to work with, but over time, I filled in the rest. I conceived of a love story, set something like this:
There was a place well outside the village of Bergen, upstream along one of the rivers that fed the great North River. The gurgling, rock-strewn water there meandered past a hidden clearing in the woods. In that place, their love was safe from the heartless, indifferent world of people who brutally scorned and abused Elstar and who would never accept their marriage. But in that sunlit sanctuary up a rise from the water and into the woods, in the shadow of an ancient boulder, they made their own sacred vows and consummated their timeless love that the people of the world rejected.
Then there was a plot that unfolded like this:
After the Bergen Square incident, when Elstar was forced to flee the righteous mob, William realized that Elstar might never be safe there and certainly not happy. The proud, steadfastly religious, Dutch, white settlers, backed by a global corporation, had stockaded themselves on the high ground, on Indian maze fields. The tolerance of others that may have twinkled occasionally from the other side of the river like oil lamps at night did not flicker at all in Bergen where the good fathers and mothers liked sameness, however bland it tasted. It really didn’t matter what Elstar was doing in the Square at night. She was there; she could be seen. And this threatened a perceived holiness of uniformity. She threatened the shaky concrete foundations upon which people, not just in Bergen, but invading throughout the continent, fearfully tried to know themselves but only ended up terrorized but what they were not. Elstar threatened them further – the men and women – with her beauty, a desirable exotic in their eyes and minds, and this made her dangerous. Secret longings, imprisoned in denial, surfaced as hate and anger directed toward her.
English and Dutch sailors, whom William and Elstar encountered in the taverns of Communipaw, told stories of a bustling settlement on the south coast of Jamaica, a Caribbean island recently seized by Cromwell’s English from the Spanish. It was called Port Royal and lay at the tip of a sandy peninsula that stretched away from the new English city, called “Kingston,” and the larger former Spanish capital city, dubbed by the English, “Spanish Town.” In Port Royal it seemed, it didn’t matter what color skin a person had, what language one spoke, where one had been and what one had done. Anyone could invent themselves there in any way sought. One just needed money. Elstar wanted to go there. So did William. Neither had the money. Then there was Otto Bruns, who crushed their dream and kept it alive.
William was reluctant to approach the weathered, mysterious captain who sat at his corner table in the corner of Bout’s dimly lit tavern, always accompanied by his giant, rainbow colored parrot and a dutiful, strange little man who often flapped his arms like wings if a stranger approached. There was a scattering of ramshackle inns on the marshy shores and islands in the morass of Communipaw, where people from around the world crossed paths, sometimes furiously, sometimes quietly. But no one crossed Bruns’s path unless it was for a reason. His reputation was known throughout the vast trading empire of the Dutch East and West India companies. He was to be left alone.
Otto Bruns had set off as a young man from Rotterdam, intent on making his fortune and settling down back home in the Netherlands with his beautiful, young betrothed. He was a gifted sailor who loved the sea, its emptiness and its possibility. He spent many nights on the ship’s watch, under a blanket sparkling with every star, fixed on a horizon, neither close nor distant, and dreaming of a quiet life on the land that he had left with the woman whom he missed and whose image dissolved more and more each night into the face of the moon, new then quarter then full then new and then not there again. The creak and roll of the ship, heavy wood straining and groaning with the rise and fall of each wave, settled his restless mind, which weighed too much on the land with its fragile solidity and false permanence.
The Dutch trade routes were lucrative but dangerous, and ship captains who needed to survive in order to get home to somewhere, someday, were much in demand. Riches came and went, but the unutterable yet immutable loneliness of the vast ocean lasted and was stronger than any survival instinct. The sea, the stars, and the moon, hung with mystery and allure, always there and forever untouchable, out of reach. Bruns sensed had nothing to lose on the earth and kept sailing toward the ever-elusive horizon, drawn to it because it could never be reached nor left behind. It was where she was waiting for him and why he sailed on. In time, the Dutch East Company offered Bruns his own ship, which he named the Volle Maan and had a masthead - a giant angel with yellow hair who held the moon in her hands, high above her head. Yellow on blue, rising and falling against the sea and sky.
It happened on Man O War Bay on the northeast coast of Tobago in the South Caribbean Sea. The Dutch had established a settlement, Nieuw Walcheren, there in 1633, but it didn’t last. The Spanish of Trinidad sacked it and killed the settlers. It was reestablished again and again, by the Dutch, then the Courlanders, then the Spanish, then the English, Dutch, French, Spanish…Later, near the end of the eighteenth century, the English would take it over once and for all and name it Charlotteville. But in the spring of 1675, Otto Bruns and the Volle Maan lay anchored in the bay while shore crews collected food for the screaming, hungry scarlet ibises that filled the ship's lower decks. He had purchased them in New Andalusia from a Mariches tribe living along the Orinoco River where the bright red birds spent their days feeding before returning at night to the mangrove swamps of Trinidad. They sold for a premium, which rose higher the farther north the market. The demand was greatest in Europe because the birds didn’t live long there, unable to adjust to short days and winter and to Europeans. Bruns’s cargo was as valued as a ship load of silver, and the ghost-like, unflagged, white ships that lowered their sails as they glided silently into Man O War Bay were ready to take it. Bruns refused to surrender and the brief battle that ensued destroyed his ship and killed most of his crew. When the last exploding cannon fire burst through the hull of the Volle Maan, a great cloud of red birds filled the air and hovered in the sky, confusing the attackers, who could no longer see the horizon and floundered on the rocks of Pirates Bay. They also missed the angel that carried the moon and a badly wounded Bruns to the shore.
As he lay on his back recovering, having been taken in by a band of maroons who fled bondage when their former owner had been killed in the colonial wars and who lived in the steep hills that rose to the southwest of the quiet settlement on the bay, he made his plans. His wound, which had castrated him and left him sexless, healed slowly, nursed by the polyrhythmic sounds of the tamboo music throughout each night. Previously barred from playing music by their enslavers, the maroon people of the steep hills coaxed melodies from bamboo and conducted choruses of lizards crying in the blackness, encircling Bruns’s distress and saving his life. He would sail again through the black night over the blue water toward horizons interred in memory, past the line between the sea and sky consumed by gunpowder and greed.
One morning, a large rainbow colored parrot flew through the open window of Bruns’s room, perched atop his bedpost, and started squawking, “What’s my name, what’s my name?!” Bruns replied, “Callie Topaz.” Thereafter, each morning, as the parrot requested, Bruns gave him a new name: “Lazarine Wess,” “Plinakot Hayes,” “Phillipe Undu,” “Telltom,” “Limon Devoy,” “Klepbo Green,” …on and on. The parrot was thrilled with each day’s new sing-song identity. Throughout his travels, Otto Bruns offered, to his parrot friend and others, the magic of reinvention from day to day and place to place.
The maroons of the hills helped him rebuild his ship, and as the masthead was fixed to the reincarnated Volle Maan, they loaded the molasses they had amassed from harvesting their sugar cane from their hidden valley fields into the cargo hold. Once Bruns set sail, nothing could stop him. English pirate ships with Spanish flags sunk to the bottom in the wake of Captain Bruns and the Volle Maan. Moroccan marauders and French privateers fell to the depths beneath the blank surface of the sea where dreams endlessly gathered and glided and frothed and slipped and broke and reformed while Bruns, under his hat adorned with big bird feathers of starlight sailed on. The seventeenth century oceans, from the roiling seas of the far east to the placid Caribbean after the tumultuous Atlantic, lured and swallowed countless men and women who set out for something and found blue-green eternity beneath the waves. Bruns sailed on.
He sailed to Barbados to sell the maroon’s molasses on the exchange there and then to proceed up the coast of North America after loading a cargo of colorful birds and their mysterious caretaker, Terendike Woo, a small, bald, wrinkled man of unknown origins who spoke only in bird songs that no one could understand but that made everyone feel at ease. He had been first sighted sitting atop a tropical almond tree in Holetown just as the Volle Maan appeared on the horizon.
The story of the attack in Man O War Bay preceded Bruns to Bridgetown, the newly established English capital on the south coast of Barbados. The crowd that gathered, as it always did when a new ship arrived in port, fearfully gave way as Bruns disembarked. The English landowners and settlers and their enslaved Africans and Irish indentures, who together outnumbered the English, knew that somehow Bruns and the Volle Maan had survived the attack of six white ships that were now wrecked and strewn across the rocks of Pirates Bay off the coast of Tobago. The lone survivor of the attacking ships, an Indian servant who had been plucked half dead from the Caribbean by a pirate ship whose captain needed someone to prepare his tea, told of a fearless sailor in a feathered hat, who, while clinging to the masthead of his doomed ship, repeatedly aimed and fired his pistol, until he was absorbed by the great cloud of red birds that confused and scattered the attackers.
Bruns, who spoke dozens of languages but who had few words for anyone, silently rejected the solicitation of companionship from the many women who offered, willingly or not, themselves to sailors seeking the comforts of the island that had once spewed lava as it grew out of the blue sea that rubbed uneasily against the green ocean. These women, as well as everyone else, parted and backed away, as Bruns limped along the promenade wearing his feathered hat. Terendike Woo, having migrated down to Bridgetown in time for the Volle Maan’s landing, fearlessly fell in behind Bruns and chirped directions to a quiet, dim inn where they disappeared inside. They remained inseparable over the next few days as business was conducted, the molasses exchanged for a cargo of birds that conversed easily with Woo as he loaded their cages onto the ship.
On a hot day in late August, they set sail on calm waters that had raged furiously just days before in a powerful hurricane, which had damaged all of the ships in the harbor except the Volle Maan. They sailed in the storm's wake until they reached the warm northward currents, which they would ride all the way up to New York, the name now given by the English to New Amsterdam, which Charles II had seized from the Dutch in 1664. But Bruns would not dock in New York. After he and Terendike Woo and the crew of maroons and their cargo of noisy birds skirted the Sandy Hook, they tacked west and lowered anchor near the little village teetering on the marshland that lay at the foot of the old trail the Lenape took from the Hackensack to the North River and which they called Communipaw. It was one place on the land where Bruns felt at ease. He was left alone, which he was everywhere now, and he liked hearing the sounds of the many languages spoken from different parts of the vast Dutch trading empire. And he took some particular, distant comfort in hearing the old Dutch language spoken here, across the harbor from English New York. Communipaw was a refuge for many, like Bruns, who had no homes elsewhere for any number of reasons. He liked this place of difference - different colors, different tongues - where there was no time to stay the same. And then one night, while sitting in the corner of Bout’s tavern, with his dutiful parrot named “Kleenput” that day, and next to Terendike, who combed the feathers of a North American Cardinal he had befriended in an elm tree, Otto Bruns removed his hat when he was approached by a young couple who needed his help.
Elstar met him after she had been punished and banished from Bergen. She had found work at the tavern. William visited her when he could. Every now and then, they got away together to their upstream clearing in the woods. Elstar hadn’t known what to make of Bruns at first. He didn’t approach her like all men did, including William. He made no advances and didn’t look at her with eyes that stopped on her skin or face or breasts or ass. His dark blue eyes looked through her and seemed to reflect the ocean lying somewhere in the distance behind her head. “Can you work? Housekeeping, cook? Give me five years of work and I’ll get you away from this madness. I sail for Barbados with the next favorable wind in October.”
Barbados. Not Port Royal.
Bruns saw it in her face. “I have business in Barbados. You’ll be safe.”
Elstar saw the drunken sailors leering at her. She heard the shouts of the English soldiers. She remembered the Parson, who said she’d be safe, sweating and heaving over her. “I’ll go.”
Awash in horror at the prospect, William first said, “You can’t go.” Then, still overwhelmed with heartache, a painful acquiescence. “You have to. I’ll get there somehow, some day.” He couldn’t understand how Elstar could go, could leave him, even though her life probably depended on it. She, on the other hand, could see distant shores - other places and times. She loved him there, too.
They renewed their vows at their place in the woods, inscribing a small rock with their initials and the moon and stars under which they knew each other. These trees filled with birds, next to clear running water bathing a rock island and brimming with fish and frogs, away from a world of people who were lost and fearful and who hated themselves and others, offered timeless sanctuary. Though they were to part, for now, this place in the woods would be with them and they would be with it past time itself.
William stood along the banks of the harbor fed by the North River and the upland streams that fed it and watched Captain Otto Brun’s ship, the Volle Maan, sail away. He last saw Elstar standing on the bow of the ship, her long dark hair in the wind and against the sky, as she rose and fell with the ship and waves.
ROCK ISLAND IV
English Channel 1995 (304 years later)
Elaine was always Elaine, I guess. It’s the name that came into my head and stayed when I first saw her in the Border Café in Montmartre a few weeks earlier. I don’t where that name had been before it was in my head – a vague memory of a movie or a dream perhaps - but it felt right. So that’s who she was from the start. I had just spent two months on the European continent – my first time there – and didn’t want to be leaving, but here I was on the channel ferry. It seemed to me that Britain was much closer to America than it was to France, and the group of Americans sprawled around the lounge across from me made me feel like I was going their way with them. In France and Italy, I seemed to be always moving away from them. Now, on my way back, there they were - disgusting young couples, well-off, shaking the channel ferry with raucous laughter and flailing limbs. I remembered what one of the men who had a stubby, shaved head and a fat, pink neck had learned in Italy: “You know that little dego sausage – it’s not cooked.”
They drank pint after pint. A broad hipped woman with slabs of skin draped over her elbows and permed, dark colored hair that was flat on top but shot out at forty-five-degree angles on the sides announced, “Let’s get drunk and party on this ride!” The exclamations of concurrence drowned out the warning coming over the P.A. that the channel was extremely rough and passengers should expect a difficult ride. I left them and went out to the bow of the ship.
A woman in blue jeans and a loose-fitting, off one shoulder, brown top leaned over the bow rail. She had long straight dark, brown hair that blew in the wind. It was Elaine. As the boat pitched up and down, she rose high into the blue sky, then back to the water-covered Earth - foam, spray, and dance - then skyward again. Her tones, the blue and brown and dark brown, were fixed and in motion and have always been.
I made my way to the rail, ten feet to her left, looked out at the swells, then turned to her. She lifted her head, pulled the hair back from her face and turned to me. Our eyes met briefly. She had a rounded nose, full lips and hazel eyes. The wind took her hair and obscured her face again. Turning further, she took hold of her hair and again smiled briefly at me in a vaguely embarrassed way and headed back inside the boat.
Negril, Jamaica 1998
I took my first trip to Jamaica, looking for something there, in January 1998, and that is where and when I finally met Elaine and got to know her and her story. I had been traveling on and off since 1992 (often thinking I saw Elaine at the places I went), and I found myself in Negril, described as “cool” by the guidebooks. It did have something of a laid back vibe, but the all-inclusive resorts were growing here and there along the Seven Mile Beach, and more heavy equipment was oozing along the unfinished still gravel and dirt highway down from Montego Bay. The hustlers were already there, peddling highs and lows, souvenirs, and women.
As it happened, since I had started traveling, started actually living away from home, I balanced (not well) between enriching my soul with natural and historic splendors and chasing usually ruinous involvements with different women. Sometimes I just thought about the latter and wrote about it, but didn’t live it. In this way, and on this particular day, I found myself positioned to take in a stunning sunset - Negril is known for these - and whoever else met my gaze - Negril is known for this, too.
My lodgings were basic. I had no interest in the sprawling all-inclusive resorts and the Americans and Europeans there. I craved authenticity - in all things - and rarely found it except in imagined words, yet I sensed it dwelt somewhere other than where those people and their trappings dwelt. I had made my way to a simple bar on the beach with white plastic tables and chairs leaning in the sand just feet from the water. Shadae, my waitress, brought me rum and soda and captivated me with her kind eyes, sweet smile, and round breasts straining against the buttons of her white, collared shirt.
But next door to my locale, workers were putting the finishing touches on a “beach party” set up on an otherwise soulless patch of beach devoid of the vegetation and coral outcroppings that lent the west coast of Jamaica its charm. The workers, dressed completely in white, scurried about putting up “One Love” signs provided by Red Stripe and Appleton, booze brands about to be consumed by thirsty people quenching the boredom of their meaningless lives. A deejay warmed up - loud music starting and stopping and trivia questions asked to no one while little laughter waves rippled in a Caribbean Sea that didn’t care.
I sat and watched the fiddler crabs. There were dozens of their tiny sand volcanoes, hastily dug fortresses. They emerged from their holes, scurried about, and then quickly retreated to their safe, underground sandcastles. Sometimes, while on the surface, they spotted one of their neighbors, nervous and tentative. They eyed each other before deciding on solitude, retreating alone, again and again, to the sand. I envied their refuge as a white bus pulled up with “Sandals Scandals” emblazoned under windows where large sun hats shaded red faces staring blankly. “Jammin’” roared from the speakers, and attentive workers handed cups of bright red rum punch to the now smiling tourists holding their sun hats to keep the mango tree churning sea breeze from stealing them. Some of the pale people and some of the red ones stopped to look at the wood carvings for sale, offered by a toothless Rastafari who sat peacefully in the shade of a knowing tropical almond tree.
Elaine saw me first, but I couldn’t help but notice her soon after she spotted me. She was with her parents and sister. They were all in white, Elaine, too. She seemed to be fitting in, which was not how I saw her before. I had her placed as an outsider, maybe a rebel, but I didn’t find out who she actually was until this time.
I couldn’t lie about anything with her and neither could she with me, sitting in front of silver cream waves that distanced us from the tourist party, a noisy shallowness dissipating in the salt spray. We walked up the beach and found a large, flat rock to sit amongst cacti, palms and coral. She told me her story, and I told her mine. We laughed at finding out about all the times our paths crossed since that first time in Paris, and we laughed about that, too, although it was harder for Elaine to laugh. It felt like I had seen her, even known her, long before, maybe always.
It was different talking with her; it felt real. But from the beginning we were headed away from each other. I sensed she was moving away from the person I first imagined her to be. Elaine was moving from the person who had lost control in a way, or became terrified of losing control, in Paris three years ago, to someone who wanted to be in control, to anticipate and avoid missteps and mess, as if she could stop her world and the world around her from falling apart, again and again. She was regretful; she viewed her travel/writing time as sordid and wasted. For her, barely in her thirties, it was time to “grow up.” She liked to say “you have to…” when explaining what she might do next, when all the while she was rationalizing giving up and embracing an illusion of safety. “You have to be an adult, you know, get married, maybe have kids, buy a house, you know, those things you have to do.” I couldn’t challenge that, and she seemed to want me to affirm her thinking with all those “you know’s,” and I couldn’t do that either. Perhaps I was a reluctant cynic, or perhaps I hoped she might change her mind. I knew she was in retreat, and I also sensed that what she sought, a retreat or not, was horribly fragile and illusory. But I never thought it would end as badly as it did.
As I knew her and liked her and thought about her a lot, I wanted to hang around her so I could find out what had happened and what might happen. The next day, we embarked on an adventure. We took a taxi to Savanna La Mar and from there boarded an old bus to take us across the island to Kingston. I had discovered that Bruns’s ship, with Elstar aboard, had left Barbados in 1692 to head back to New York and had been diverted by a storm to Port Royal, and I wanted to explore that ancient peninsula, severed and washed away by two earthquakes. Was that where Elstar ended up? Where her story continued? Did Van Arsdale ever find her? Did they find each other? I was intrigued, and when I told Elaine, she was, too. She told me that our little adventure made her feel like something of her old, inspired traveling self before any mess. It was spur of the moment and rough, but it was with me, she and I together for this part.
“You’re not dangerous.” I wasn’t, but wondered if a woman might ever view me a little that way. I turned away from Elaine’s long hair and profile and what they made me feel and looked out the window at giant, low, dark purple clouds with brilliant yellow sides and tops, and between them sky blue windows of dream, desire, and infinite lonely comfort. And then I turned back and looked at Elaine and wondered if both our misadventures these past few years had somehow brought us together to find out. But exactly what I did not know yet.
From town to town, our conversation consisted of calling out the names of countless bars we passed, a map of the post-colonial island nation: Exotic Sophisticate, Nan’s Chill Spot, Drinking Corner, BJ's Boulevard, Sublime Sugar Plum Lounge, Tracy's, Donald's, Kim's, Carla’s, Chinny Sports Bar, Jake Ruby's, Rose Hutch. XOXO Sports Bar, Sunrise Sports Bar, Whiskey Vibes, Millions Bar, Space Legacy Bar, Club Mountain Bar and Gaming Lounge, Top Tier Bar, Bitches Chill Spot, Yogi's Booze Pub, Main Street Bar, Flames, Girls Crush Bar, Rheumet Sports Bar and Grill, New Levels Sports Bar, Siba, Active Sports Bar, Exotic Twist, Bango’s Sports Bar, First Choice Bar, Sweet Flames Bar…
Elaine’s sense of adventure waned quickly on the rickety bus, the seats without cushions, the windows that didn’t open, the packed-in passengers buried under over-filled mesh bags and smelling of soap and sweat. Still, she was captivated by the street scenes - zinc-roofed shacks, the curiously named, sadly stocked, unattended bars, coconut stands, school kids in pressed uniforms followed by hopeful dogs. “I am glad I am getting to see all of this. This is the real Jamaica,” she explained as night fell and her silhouette in the window mingled with the dirty yellow of street lamps, familiar fast food neon, and distant flashing red and blue.
From Spanish Town to Kingston, a colonial history paved over and a new one sprouting up through dust and concrete. Now Japanese and Korean cars whizzed past Chinese owned stores, endless fields of clear and colored plastic litter that filled the Kingston sprawl from the mountains of the north and east - green ringlets of ancient, rounded volcanoes with their sides carved out for the bauxite and limestone, mined and shipped to China - to the harbor where container ships from East Asia parked and where the peninsula tipped by Port Royal extended into the Caribbean. Fast Food - KFC and Burger King and Wendy’s and Dominoes; shacks and dust and deserted bars morphing into gated communities where giant, vicious dogs growled, barked and spit at nothing.
From the bus station, we grabbed a taxi to take us out the long road from Kingston, passed the Norman Manley Airport, and on to Port Royal. The driver asked if we had been there before, and Elaine didn’t answer. I told him that I had wanted to explore the place for a long time. Elaine was looking out the window as if searching for something. I wondered. I wondered a lot about Elaine and her story and now our story. I knew essentially nothing about love or women then. But I felt like I was starting to know Elaine, and I felt like Elaine knew some things about me, too.