* * * *
You got to Utopia by flying there; it lay in another direction he had never traveled far in, on the wry neck of the continent, very near the peaks of Darien.
"I can't go to the tropics,” he said, even as they drove to the airport. “I hate beaches. I have beachophobia."
"What!"
"I get burned,” he said. “I lie on the bare shingle staring at the sun. Me and a hundred naked others, each on his towel square. It's like going to existential hell. And the pointless sea repeating itself."
"Oh for heaven's sake.” She wore sunglasses already, in the wintry light. “You don't just lie there. And you don't try to read. I bet you try to read."
He didn't admit this.
"Hard books. Small print.” She changed lanes, the airport turn ahead. “No. No no. You've got to get up, and walk."
The capital of Utopia was, surely still is, called the City of Eternal Spring. Not its name, but what its name is called. To reach it they would fly to Florida first, and cross the state in a rented car, and fly again from the Gulf Coast. She'd found out it was the cheapest way.
So on the way they stopped in that small and largely bypassed resort town where Pierce's mother and Doris, her partner of many years, kept a small motel.
"You're going where?” his mother said in bewilderment. “You're doing what?” Having been asleep till late, she stood in the kitchen of her small house and office in her rayon negligee (could this be one of those that she'd had when he was a boy? Or was she still able to find and buy them somewhere?) and looked at their swollen backpacks—Pierce's borrowed—and at him, and at Roo. “You hate the beach,” she said.
"It's not just beach,” Roo said. “It's mountains."
"Jungle,” said Pierce.
"Rain forest,” said Roo. She put her arm around his shoulder, as though she were the taller of them. “He can do it."
That night, though, she stayed far from him in their double bed in their cabin, which he had insisted on paying for—the same cabin he had once suffered in, you remember—as though a sword had been laid between them. Next day she bade goodbye to Winnie cheerfully, almost euphorically, as Winnie did too back to her, and on the road again, silent beside her in the rent-a-car, Pierce understood in amazement that he, or he and Roo, had started an emotion in his mother, the first new one he had witnessed in decades, and it was jealousy.
The little City of Eternal Spring (high enough in the mountains, near enough to the equator, that its useless thermometers stood every day at room temperature) was plain, nearly paradigmatic: a grid of streets, some named for heroes and the dates of victories and the rest numbered; a brown and white population neither rich nor poor, churches neither grand nor squalid, the one cathedral humbly made of wood. Pierce and Roo took buses here and there, sitting amid placid people and their babies. How still they sat. A peace began to descend on Pierce, and Roo took his hand. Later he would doubt that he had, in the weeks they spent in that nation then and afterward, ever seen a child crying.
Some thirty years before, a brief and nearly bloodless revolution had toppled a corrupt oligarchy. A Cincinnatus from the countryside had come to power; he disbanded the army, reformed the electoral system, set up national welfare and health care. They wanted him to be president for life but he told them No no you must have political parties, and candidates, and you must vote; and then at the end of his term he went back to his ranch, and they did what he had told them to do, and now election days are joyous celebrations, and everyone votes.
"It's true,” Pierce said. “All true."
"I know,” Roo said. “All true. Not even the police have guns. I told you."
They went on a bus out of the City of Eternal Spring into the country. The people of the country were woodworkers, famous for what they made of the hundred different woods of the forest. Their houses, even humble ones where chickens scratched the dirt, had great paneled carved doors that would last a century. After going a long way downward they changed in a sultry plaza for a smaller hand-painted bus and went upward again, rising toward another mountain (there were three mountains pictured on the great seal of the nation, two tall peaks like a wide green M with the third between them, like Randa, Merrow, and Whirligig in the land from which they had come). The bus lurched, straining like a fat man to climb steep dirt roads increasingly narrow, its holy pictures and beaded valances and rosaries swaying side to side. People got on and others got off. “It's on ahead,” said Roo.
Up on the mountain that they climbed, at the end of the tortuous track, was where she had been invited to come. There, a body of American pacifists, Christian farmers, had come long ago fleeing the draft that wanted to take their sons, and there they had established, on the eternal cool green meadows of the mountain's heights, the new nation's first and now its largest commercial dairy. Pierce thought of them arriving here, self-exiled, in a small nation just disarmed, to make milk.
"We walk from here,” said Roo, studying a travel-stained typed paper she had carried from the States, her directions; they'd come to her from an entomologist, an old friend or boyfriend, Pierce gathered, who with a dozen other researchers from around the world lived and worked here too, as though in Eden, naming the animals: bugs in particular, of which there were countless kinds. He'd invited Roo; Pierce didn't know if he had also been expected. There were scorpions around too, Roo said; scorpions galore.
"This way saves a lot of time,” she said. “The bus goes all the way around the mountain. We can go straight up. There's a path—see?"
They weren't the only ones setting out on it, there were mothers with bundles and children and a man with a machete slung at his waist in a worked leather scabbard, like a knight's sword. Pierce lifted the backpack, slung it over his shoulders as she'd shown him, and pulled the waistband tight. That was the secret, she'd said. You can carry a lot of weight, if you balance it right.
A lot of weight. Almost immediately sweat tickled on his brow. The path wound upward, and one by one those who walked with them came to their houses, small farms and cabins, and waved farewell. Roo asked the way, said the name of the dairy and the research station, and they nodded and pointed ahead. The path entered the forest and narrowed, as though making up its mind what it must do, and then decided to ascend straight upward, seeming to disappear. Take small steps, she called back to Pierce. You don't have to lope, she said. You don't have to stride. Just make a little progress, a little steady progress.
And they came at length over a crest, and into green meadows, right amid the clouds: clouds actually stood on the next higher crest, and the next crest beyond that couldn't be seen at all under its broad hat of white. Black and white cows lifted their heads to see them, and one by one returned to cropping the emerald grasses. A flight of parakeets occurred, red and yellow. A tall, vanishingly thin man was walking toward them, white shirt ballooning, gibbon's arm raised in welcome, what a coincidence.
They three walked together, Roo and her friend in reminiscence. To Pierce it seemed not like visiting the tropics but like returning to the land his fairy ancestors had come from. The lowing cows, belled and horned, were called home at evening, winding slowly o'er the lea. Little lanes led through the dewy grass and along the tangled hedges from house to house, and from their open Dutch doors he and Roo would be hailed in cheerful English, but rainbows, single, double, triple, came and went continually over the breasted fields as the big clouds and their small children passed over just above their heads, and warm showers wet their faces for a moment. Underfoot grew a million small flowers in candy colors, just like the flowers that color the edges of the forest floor in woodland cartoons—they were called, Roo said, impatience.